Use Turnitin to Check for Plagiarism

Last updated on March 18, 2026

Turnitin is a Canvas-integrated software that can review text submissions from students for plagiarism. You can use Turnitin to ensure academic integrity in your course in the same way you may have used Unicheck or SafeAssign. Activating Turnitin is done on a per-assignment basis and is easy to do while creating the assignment.

Please note that Turnitin is not an AI detection tool. Instead, Turnitin checks for similarities against internet content, published works, and previously submitted assignments. It will analyze similarity patterns as well as citations, quotations, and paraphrasing, to provide a similarity report.

Directions

Create a Turnitin Assignment

1. Log in to Canvas.
2. Select the Course you’d like to work in.
3. Click Modules in the left-hand course navigation menu.
4. Scroll down to the Module that you’d like to add a Turnitin assignment to.
5. Click the + icon in the top right-hand corner of the module.
6. Click Create Assignment.
7. Enter a Name for the assignment.
8. Click Add Item in the bottom right-hand corner.
9. Click the Assignment at the bottom of the module.
10. Click Edit in the top right-hand corner.
11. Enter Instructions for the assignment in the large text field below the name.
12. Scroll down to Submission Type.
13. Click the Drop-Down Menu that says “No Submission”.
14. Click Online.
15. Select Text Entry, File Upload, or both.
16. Scroll down to Plagiarism Review.
17. Click the Drop-Down Menu that says “None”.
18. Select Turnitin.
    • You can choose to exclude the Bibliography or Quotes from being flagged as similar content. It is not recommended to modify any of the other settings.
19. Choose Other Assignment Settings as desired.
20. Click Save and Publish at the bottom of the page.
    • When students make a submission to a Turnitin assignment, they will be required to check a box agreeing to the tool’s End User License Agreement and affirming that they are submitting their own, original work.

Access the Similarity Report for a Turnitin Assignment

Once a student submits their work to a Turnitin assignment, a Similarity Report will be generated showing what percentage of the content is similar to publicly accessible content or content uploaded to Turnitin’s database.

1. Open the Assignment that you would like to view Similarity Reports for.
2. Click Speedgrader on the right-hand side.
3. Locate the Student that you would like to view the similarity report using the arrows or drop-down menu in the top right-hand corner.
   • Note: A Resubmit for Plagiarism button will appear for students who have not submitted the assignment yet, or if the original report didn’t generate properly. You can ignore this button unless you would like to update a similarity report for a student submission.
4. Click on the Colored Icon next to the file name on the right-hand side.
   • The icon may be colored green, yellow, or red and will display a percentage indicating how much of the submission is similar to reference material. A lower score is better.
   • If this is your first time accessing Turnitin, you will be prompted to agree to the terms and conditions before seeing the report.
5. Click Filters in the top right-hand corner of the page to choose which sources to check for similarity or choose certain elements to exclude.
6. Click Match Groups to see similarity matches by category.
   • Click a specific Match Group from the menu to automatically scroll to see text similarities within that category.
7. Click Sources to view a list of sources with similarities.
8. Click the Show Overlapping Sources to view multiple similar sources for a particular passage.
9. Click on any of the Similar Sources in the right-hand panel to view what passages are similar.
   • Click Exclude Match to not count the similar text within the similarity report.
     • Please note that to protect the intellectual property rights of Turnitin users, you cannot view the actual source material for user-submitted works in the repository, only how much of it is similar. Clicking other sources, like internet sources, will display the similar portion of text.
10. Click Flags at the top of the page to view detected issues like hidden text or replaced characters.
    • Flags indicate a deliberate attempt to evade plagiarism detection.
11. Click the Download icon in the top right-hand corner to download or print the similarity report for future reference.