Turnitin Assignments in Ultra Courses

Turnitin can assist in detecting unoriginal or un-paraphrased content in written submissions. The tool generates a "similarity report" that shows what percentage of the submission matches existing content in Turnitin's repositories.

The Office of Academic Affairs offers policy guidance on using Turnitin and a recommended syllabus statement instructors can use to notify students that they are using Turnitin.

Turnitin AI Detection No Longer Available

The free preview of the Turnitin AI Detection Tool has expired as of Jan. 1, 2024. Due to concerns about the reliability of this tool and the significant cost, ITS has decided not to license this tool at this time. The standard plagiarism detections tools will continue to be available via Turnitin.

For more information read Online Learning Services' statement on AI writing detection.

If you have any further questions about AI writing tools and technology, please contact the Online Learning Services team at help@syr.edu.

Policy questions about academic integrity should be directed to the Center for Learning and Student Success (CLASS)

- 1.1 Turnitin AI Detection No Longer Available
2 Adding Turnitin Assignments
- 2.1 Optional Settings
- 2.2 Edit Assignment Start and End Dates
3 AI Writing Detection
4 Additional Resources

Adding Turnitin Assignments

To add a Turnitin assignment to your course, click on the "purple plus sign" in your course content area and select "Content Market" from the drop down list. This assignments act as a standard content item and can be moved or created inside of folders or learning modules.

Select the "Turnitin tile" from the content market.

Complete the fields from the pop up menu.

Each assignment requires a Title, Instructions, and Max Grade.
Start Date: This creates a release condition that defines when students will be able to open the assignment. In the meantime they will see a link for it, but they will not see the details or be able to launch it. This can be edited in Blackboard.
Due Date: This creates a due date for the assignment. This can be edited in Blackboard
Feedback Release Date: This is the date and time when the grade will post automatically in Blackboard and when the student will be able to see feedback and their grade in Turnitin.
PeerMark: This enables the ability for instructors to attach a PeerMark Assignment to the submission. In PeerMark Assignments, students review and comment on the work of one or more classmates. Instructors can add review criteria and grade students on the comments students provide to colleagues. .

Click save to complete the assignment.

Optional Settings

Most assignments are made with the default settings, but there are additional settings available.

Submission settings contain additional criteria such as:

Allowing late submissions
Defining what file types are allowed
Enabling anonymous grading
Attaching Rubrics
Enabling Grammar Checking
Determining what, if any, repositories the paper is added to.

For more information on the submission settings, please visit adjusting assignment settings.

The compare against settings allows you to select what repositories the submissions are compared to when the software creates the similarity report. By default, papers are compared against all four repositories: student paper repository, institution student paper repository, current and archived web site content, and periodicals, journals, and publications.

To learn more about the different repositories please visit Turntin Support.

The submitted paper is compared to Turnitin's primary databases. Turnitin then generates a similarity report, which indicates whether the student properly cited all sources and if additional measures or help may be warranted. The similarity report has options for when the similarity report is generated and made available to students, and if the student can resubmit to the assignment.

By default, the similarity report is generated immediately, is available to students, and student cannot resubmit. The dropdown menu can be used to change between the options for generating the similarity report. There are options below the dropdown menu for excluding portions of the paper.

For more information on the similarity report, please visit Turnitin Support.

If you would like your students to use a template you provide for the assignment, you can upload a template to the turnitin assignment so that the template is excluded from the similarity report. For more information about excluding assignment templates, please visit Turnitin Support.

If you check the box to "save these settings for future use," the options selected for this assignment will become your new default settings.

Edit Assignment Start and End Dates

AI Writing Detection

The free preview of the Turnitin AI Detection Tool has expired as of Jan. 1, 2024. Due to concerns about the reliability of this tool and the significant cost, ITS has decided not to license this tool at this time. The standard plagiarism detections tools will continue to be available via Turnitin. For more information, please contact the Online Learning Services team at help@syr.edu.

Additional Resources

Turnitin provides a number of addition resources on assignment settings and general guidance for instructors.