Turnitin draft assignments

If you think that your written work may too closely resemble your source material, you can enter your draft assignment into text-matching software before submitting the final version to the assignment link in your topic.

Draft assignments for each of your FLO topics can be uploaded to the University's Text matching course to get a text-matching report through Turnitin.

The Text matching course is not connected to any topics, and topic coordinators do not have access. It is to be used to check draft assignments only and cannot be used for final assignment submission.

Step 1

Go to the University's Text-matching course. You will need to log in if you have not already done so.

A link can also be found in your topic's Assessment hub.

Step 2

Click on the Click here to submit your draft assignment button.

Submit draft assignment button

Step 3

You will reach the current text-matching module (which is time based).

Turnitin attempt button

Click on the Start Assignment button. Note: You will see the New Attempt button after your first submission.

Step 4

Upload and agree to End User License Agreement

Follow the prompts to upload and choose a file [1].

Tick the End-User License Agreement box [2].

Click the Submit assignment button [3].

Step 5

The screen will shower animated confetti. You will notice that Submission details on the right of the page will appear.

Submitted draft

A search will now be conducted to match text against the Internet, globally submitted student papers and accessible content databases, including library databases, textbook publishers and digital reference collections. The report result time will vary from 5 minutes to 24 hours.

Step 6

Click on the Submission details link on the right of the page.

Submission details link

You will see the document you submitted, and a coloured box with a percentage number, which you can click on to open the report in a new tab.

Draft Turnitin percentage

The percentage is the amount of text in your paper that has been matched to other sources. Remember, this tool only matches text; it does not make any decisions about whether the matched text is plagiarism or not.

Text matching can occur for many valid reasons (such as including the question in your paper, or correctly quoting or referencing a source), so a percentage of 0% matching is rare. There is also no real threshold percentage where one can say the level of text matching is acceptable or not. The determination of what is plagiarism and what is not, is a human decision, not a numerical one.

Refer to Interpreting the Turnitin text-matching report for more details.