Creating a Canvas Assignment with Turnitin

Turnitin is a tool integrated with Canvas assignments to check for plagiarism. Students submit documents electronically through Canvas, and Turnitin returns a similarity score indicating how much of the submitted document may contain plagiarized work. As the instructor, you have the opportunity to review the submissions and possible plagiarism issues.

Create an Assignment with a Turnitin Plagiarism Check

  1. In Canvas, click on the Assignments course navigation link on the left side of the screen.
  2. Click on the ➕ Assignment button on the top right corner of the screen.
  3. On the next screen, add details to your assignment such as Assignment Name, a description of the assignment using the Rich Content Editor (RCE), Points, Assignment Group, and Display Grade as.
  4. For the Submission Type option, select Online from the drop-down list, and then check the box(es) for Text Entry and/or File Uploads. These are the only two options that will enable the Turnitin options on your screen.
    • Text Entry: Students type or copy/paste text into a Rich Content Editor (RCE) of the Canvas assignment.
    • File Uploads: Students attach a file for submission such as a PDF, DOC, DOCX, PPTX, etc.
      • You can further restrict file types that can be submitted to you using the Restrict Upload File Types checkbox.
  5. The Plagiarism Review section will appear on the screen. Select the Turnitin option from the drop-down menu. Once selected, additional Turnitin options will display on your screen.
  6. From the Show report to students drop-down list, select from Immediately, After the assignment is graded, After the due date, or Never.
This is a screenshot of the "Plagiarism Review" settings panel within the integrated Turnitin interface. At the top, a dropdown menu highlighted by a yellow circle containing the number "5" has "Turnitin" selected. Below the Turnitin logo are configuration options: under "Exclude from Similarity Reports," the checkboxes for "Bibliography" and "Quotes" are unchecked, while under "Submission Indexing," the "Index all submissions" checkbox is checked. For "Generate Similarity Reports," the radio button next to "Immediately and on due date - Recommended" is selected. At the bottom, another dropdown menu highlighted by a yellow circle containing the number "6" for the setting "Show report to students" is currently set to "Immediately".
  1. Set any other properties for the assignment as needed, and then click either the Save & Publish button or the Save button.

Review Plagiarism of an Assignment Submission

After an assignment has been submitted, there are two places in your Canvas course where a Turnitin indicator appears:

Grades

Click on Grades on the left-hand Canvas course navigation menu. A Turnitin similarity score icon will appear next to a student’s submission. The color of the icon will depend on the percentage score of the student’s submission.

  • Blue – No matching text
  • Green – One (1) word to 24% matching text
  • Yellow – 25% to 49% matching text
  • Orange – 50% to 74% matching text
  • Red – 75% to 100% matching text

Click within the cell, and select the ➡️ right arrow icon. A slide-out tray will appear on the right side of your screen. Click on the SpeedGrader button.

A screenshot of the Canvas LMS Gradebook interface showing a list of students and a column for the "Paragraph Assignment." In the row for the third student, there is a submission icon alongside a small orange Turnitin similarity indicator, showing that the assignment has been submitted and a Turnitin report is available. The other students in the list have hyphens in this column, indicating no submissions.

SpeedGrader

Another way to access the SpeedGrader in Canvas is to click on the name of an assignment on the Assignments index page. Then click on the SpeedGrader button on the right-hand side of the screen.

In the Canvas SpeedGrader, a student’s submission is displayed on the left side screen. For the purposes of this example:

  • The student included a portion of Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address in his paragraph submission. Canvas would not normally highlight this text, but we’ve manually highlighted it in yellow to show you where the text has been inserted.
  • An orange Turnitin similarity score of 55% is displayed next to the submitted file name. Click on the percentage icon to get further details from Turnitin about the plagiarism issue(s).
A screenshot of the Canvas SpeedGrader interface displaying a student's submission for the "Paragraph Assignment." The document viewer on the left shows the submitted text, with a large section containing the Gettysburg Address highlighted in yellow by Turnitin showing matched content. On the right sidebar, under submission details, an arrow points to an orange Turnitin score icon displaying "55%" next to the submitted file named "Paragraph Assignment.docx." The sidebar also lists the submission date and time, a word count of 62, and a field to enter a grade out of 100.

After clicking on the percentage score, you will see the Turnitin Plagiarism Framework Dashboard. Three tabs are displayed at the top of the screen: Similarity (with a percentage), Flags, and AI Writing (with a percentage). An Overall Similarity percentage score summary box appears on the right side of the screen.

Turnitin will highlight any issues that it finds with the student’s submission. In the below example, Turnitin has identified a portion of text that may have been copied from another source. Click on the pink icon either to the left of the highlighted area or under the Overall Similarity box.

  • NOTE: Depending on the types of issues Turnitin finds, your interface may not look exactly like what is shown below.
A screenshot of the Turnitin similarity report interface for the document "Paragraph Assignment.docx," displaying a prominent "55% Overall Similarity" score at the top and in the right sidebar. The document text on the left has a large section highlighted in pink, containing the text "Four score and seven years ago...", marked with the number "1" and indicated by an arrow. The right sidebar provides a breakdown of the matches, where an arrow points to the primary source listed under "Not Cited or Quoted": match "1" from the Internet source "www.coursehero.com," accounting for the entire 55% similarity.

Clicking on the www.coursehero.com item on the right side of the screen (shown above) will bring display additional details on where similar text was found (shown below).

This screenshot of a Turnitin Similarity Report shows a student's paper, "Paragraph Assignment.docx," with a section highlighted in pink indicating potential plagiarism. The highlighted sentence reads: "during the Civil War. Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal." On the right side, a "55% Overall Similarity" panel is displayed, detailing that this 55% match comes from a single internet source, "www.coursehero.com." Expanding the source details reveals the full URL and a text snippet from the source document, which contains the exact same highlighted sentence found in the student's paper, confirming it is a direct match.
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A Note on Artificial Intelligence (AI)

Please be aware that Turnitin may give false positives related to AI. If Turnitin finds positive AI use, start a conversation with your student following the information provided in Using AI Detection at CCS before taking any automatic disciplinary action. Grades cannot automatically be changed due to AI detection software results.

Additional Resources