Plagiarism checking

Using someone else’s words or ideas without saying where they came from is called plagiarism. To help check for plagiarism, we use Turnitin — a tool that compares your assignment to billions of sources, including:

• websites
• books
• newspapers
• scholarly journals
• magazines
• other student assignments

Turnitin will check your work and return a similarity or originality report to show that your submitted assignment is your original work.

Whether you can check your work using Turnitin before submitting your assignment depends on the individual subject.

Checking your work

Turnitin is built into Brightspace. Whether you can use Turnitin to check your work before submitting your assignment depends on the individual subject.

If you’re unsure whether Turnitin is available in your subject, or how it’s being used, check your Subject Outline or ask your Subject Coordinator.

• In some subjects, you can submit your assignment early to get a similarity report. This report shows how much of your work matches other sources. You can then make changes and resubmit before the due date. Your final submission before the deadline will be marked.
• In other subjects, there may be a draft submission option just for checking your similarity report. After checking, you’ll still need to submit your final version in the correct place.
• Sometimes, Turnitin may only be used by your Subject Coordinator after you submit your final assignment.

If you are a Higher Degree Research (HDR) student, your supervisor can provide more information as to options for Originality checking.

• Quick Start Guide to Interpreting Similarity Reports [PDF]