University at Buffalo (UB)
Empowering Instructors | Supporting Excellence
Turnitin in UB Learns
Published February 21, 2024
Ensuring your students uphold Academic Integrity Standards is an important part of being an instructor. As artificial intelligence (AI) becomes more prominent in everyday use, we need to be more vigilant in how our students are incorporating generative AI into their assignments.
UB Learns has a third party plagiarism tool called Turnitin (TII). This tool allows instructors to choose whether to run student submissions through a program that checks for plagiarism, checks for AI-generated work and can be used to provide feedback to students.
The following information can be used to enable TII and use it to enhance your grading experience.
If the concern is about plagiarism and AI for an assignment, it is important to first enable Turnitin through the “Manage Turnitin” setting. Instructors must enable Turnitin for each assignment separately. It is not possible to enable Turnitin for an entire course.
Enabling Turnitin on Assignments
Click on the chevron next to the assignment you wish to enable Turnitin on, then select Edit Assignment.
When in the Assignments tool in UB Learns, click on the chevron next to the assignment you wish to enable Turnitin on. Next, click Edit Assignment from the pop-up menu.
Under Evaluation and Feedback, click on Manage Turnitin.
In the Edit Assignment window, expand Evaluation & Feedback. At the bottom, click the Manage Turnitin hyperlink.
Select the Turnitin features you would like to enable for the assignment.
In the Turnitin Integration menu, select the integrations you would like to enable for the assignment. Options include:
- Enabling a Similarity Report.
- Enable feedback and grading within the Turnitin Feedback Studio
Once you have made your selections, click Save.
Once back in the Edit Assignment window, in the Evaluation & Feedback, you will see verification of which Turnitin features are enabled.
In the Edit Assignment window, under Evaluation & Feedback, you will now see which Turnitin integrations enabled for the assignment.
Once all integrations have been enabled for your assignment, click Save and Close in the Edit Assignment window.
If the assignment has guidance or verbiage that is included with the submission, there is an option to create a template so that those words won’t count as part of the plagiarism detector.
Enabling Exclusions in Turnitin
Click on More Options button in the Turnitin Integrations menu.
To exclude verbiage or guidance from being labelled as plagiarized in Turnitin, naviage to the Turnitin Integration menu for the assignment (see above). Once in the Turnitin Integration menu, click More Options.
Under Exclude Assignment Template, you can choose to upload an existing template or create a new template.
- Please note: If you choose Create Custom Template, you will have to manually type in the guidance or verbiage you would like to exclude from the plagiarism check.
Once done, click Submit. Next, click Save in the Turnitin Integrations window. Finally, click Save and Close in the Assignment window.
When your students submit an assignment with TII enabled, it is important to review the submissions. The similarity report will not only show you any plagiarism it has detected, but it can also provide an estimate of how much AI-generated text a student has used in place of their writing. When a student submits the assignment, they will only receive a plagiarism report if it was enabled, but will not be given a suspected AI use score. Even if Turnitin shows a score of “0%” for similarity, the AI-use score might be different.
An example submission with Turnitin Similarity Report Enabled. The score is 14%, which may seem low and neglible, but it does not show the AI use in the score. Click on the percentage to show the AI detection feature.
This score of 14% may seem to be low, leading some instructors to not click on the Similarity Report. However, if you go into the report by clicking on the percentage, you will see a more in-depth analysis of the student’s work.
Here we see that even though the report had a low similarity, the AI Detector, located at the bottom of the list, indicates that 2% of the student writing could be AI generated.
The AI Detection is at the bottom of the list. It indicates that 2% of the student writing could be AI generated.
Do not be quick to assume the AI check is accurate. TurnItIn acknowledges that low AI scores could indicate a false positive. We recommend reaching out to a student and initiating Academic Integrity protocols if the AI Writing Score is at least 35 - 45%. If the score is lower than this threshold, it is still important to reach out to the student and see if they utilized AI in creating their assignment.
This is the disclaimer for the Turnitin AI Detector. It specifically mentions that low scores have a higher likelihood of false positives.
If you have any questions about how TII is integrated into UB Learns, please reach out to our UB Learns Support Team. You can learn more about Turnitin at their website.
Author
Author
Editor and Contributor
Contact us
Office of Curriculum, Assessment and Teaching Transformation
716-645-7700
ubcatt@buffalo.edu