Turnitin is an Internet-based plagiarism detection service run by the American company Turnitin, LLC, a subsidiary of Advance Publications.
Nearly everyone, including professors and students, is familiar with Turnitin. To help students develop strong academic habits regarding proper citation and reference practices, several institutions all over the world have adopted a text-matching program called Turnitin because of its effectiveness. When an assignment is submitted through Turnitin, Turnitin compares the student’s contribution to a database of Internet documents and data, a subscription database of periodicals, journals, and publications, and a repository of previously submitted papers. Then, Turnitin generates an “Originality Report” that both lecturers and students can view. This report shows where text in a student’s submission matches text from another source. The report Turnitin generates after examining a student’s submission against the Internet, archives of previously submitted papers, and subscription archives of periodicals, journals, and publications is known as the “Originality report. The “Originality Report” shows which parts of a student’s work were “text-matched” to material from other sources. The “Originality Report” includes a detailed breakdown of which text within the submission has been matched against which source as well as the overall “similarity index” percentage (the total percent of the submission matched against other sources) (e.g., internet sites, journals, or previous submissions).
Turnitin collaborates with educational institutions to encourage truthfulness, uniformity, and equity across all topic areas and assessment methods. Turnitin is currently being used by many institutions worldwide, including those in Nigeria, to improve the educational experience they offer to their students. Turnitin is used by the Lagos Business School to teach students proper citation and reference practices and to provide the school with assurance about the academic integrity of students’ work. Turnitin improves how students obtain their scores and feedback on assessment items while giving lecturers and tutors access to contemporary online grading tools. Every institution has a benchmark for the similarity index of submitted essays. The one for the Lagos Business School is 15%. This means your evaluation must be properly paraphrased, with very low text matches, and well cited.
My first experience with Turnitin came when we were handed our first academic essay assignment. In the end, I had a similarity index of 35%. This clearly indicated that a portion of my work was quite like already published materials. Turnitin was something I had never used before. My similarity index was far greater than my school’s baseline. But it was just the beginning; with Turnitin’s assistance, I gradually improved my writing.
Turnitin has been created in a way that even the tiniest instance of blatant text matching will be detected and marked red. This helped me in creating unique and original content. I immediately understood the value of putting in a lot of effort, conducting in-depth research, using good grammar, and creating original content since I was afraid of getting a bad score if this happened to my essay. I got better at writing my subsequent essays and eventually could easily beat the 15% benchmark. My Turnitin scores are always less than 7%. Turnitin also gave me access to an online learning system that integrates traditional media, recorded lessons, videos, and links to other resources, focusing on technology and novel learning experiences.
Thank you, LBS, for this beautiful experience.
