Turnitin Originality Checker is a Blackboard plugin that allows student submissions to be compared against other submitted assignments and text on the web in order to determine whether submitted work is original. When students submit their work, you’ll be able to see what components of their submission match with other text on the internet, and you can exclude or include text that is found inside quotation marks. Turnitin is also able to recognize closely paraphrased text.
As a result, you’ll be able to let your students know whether they have submitted work that includes text that is not original but that is not enclosed in quotation marks, text that is too closely paraphrased, or if too much of the paper is unoriginal, even if it is quoted and cited correctly.
You can also enable or disable students’ ability to see this originality report. While disabling this feature works in some contexts, many faculty members choose to keep this option enabled so that students can review the report and make changes so that they are using sources properly.
Video: Creating a Turnitin Assignment in Blackboard
Video: Grading a Turnitin Assignment
Note that you should wait until past the due date to grade Turnitin Assignments. If you grade assignments before the due date, students may resubmit and your comments will be deleted.
Rubrics and the quickmarks commenting features in Turnitin can be a great timesaver and can help you construct structured feedback. However, students may have a hard time finding the comments because by default because these commenting views are turned off. You might consider sending students this blog post to help them find your comments.
In addition, if a user would like to check the originality of a paper outside of the Blackboard environment, they can do so via a Quick Submit option on Turnitin’s website. This will require that the user log into Turnitin and activate the Quick Submit functionality. Once this is done, it has all the functionality that one would find within Blackboard. We have provided a video tutorial demonstrating how you access both the page and the Quick Submit functionality.