Turnitin is a anti-plagiarism tool that combines text-matching with writing style analysis, enabling educators and users to assess the authenticity of any text. To create an Turnitin assignment, simply create an assignment as you usually would in Canvas.


Creating a Turnitin assignment

The below steps will focus only on those steps that differ for the purpose of creating a Turnitin assignment.

For detailed steps on this, please see How to create an assignment in Canvas.

Before the option to turn on the Turnitin plagiarism tool pops up, select the following 

  • Submission type - From the dropdown select Online
  • Online entry options - Click the option File Uploads
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Once you have selected the above the Plagiarism Review option will then appear in the menu






From this dropdown menu select Turnitin 

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Once selected you will be presented with additional options

Store submissions in: Select which Turnitin repositories students' submissions will be checked against when processing Similarity Reports for submissions. This allows an instructor to disregard a source type if the comparison against this type of source is not needed. The Similarity Score may decrease if a repository option is deselected.

There are three options:

  1. Standard paper repository - Submissions are stored in the global Turnitin repository.
  2. Institution paper repository - Submissions are stored in a repository which is only accessible by your institution.
  3. Do not store the submitted papers - A Similarity Report will be generated for submissions, but submissions will not be stored in the standard repository or the institution’s repository for future comparison.
Compare submissions against: These options allow you to select the repositories that students' submissions will be checked against when processing Similarity Reports. The Similarity Score may decrease if a repository option is deselected.

There are four checkboxes:

  1. Student repository - This option compares current submissions to previous submissions in classes and assignments in Turnitin across institutions.
  2. Institution repository - This option compares current submissions to the repository of student papers unique to your institution.
  3. Website content - This option compares current submissions to a repository of archived and live publicly available internet pages containing billions of pages of existing content with tens of thousands of new pages added daily.
  4. Periodicals, journals, & publications - This option compares current submissions to third party periodical, journal, and publication content including many major professional journals, periodicals, and business publications.

Similarity report: This setting allows students to view their Similarity Reports for submissions to this assignment. This only pertains to the similarity score aspect of the report. Use this setting if you want your students to see their grading and feedback but not their similarity score.

It is possible to exclude certain elements from the similarity report including the following: 

  1. Exclude bibliographic materials - This setting excludes text that appears in the bibliography, works cited, or references sections of student papers from being checked for matches when generating Similarity Reports. You can overwrite this setting in individual Similarity Reports
  2. Exclude quoted materials - This setting excludes quotations from being checked for matches when generating Similarity Reports. You can overwrite this setting in individual Similarity Reports.
  3. Exclude small sources - This setting excludes matches that are not of sufficient length (determined by you) from being considered when generating Similarity Reports. Once this setting has been checked, a box will appear where you can exclude matches by word count or by percentage. You can overwrite this setting in individual Similarity Reports.

Save as default settings
Select this checkbox to save the current settings as default, so that if you create another Turnitin assignment it will have the same settings.


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  • Choose when the Turnitin report should be made available to students from one of the options available in the dropdown

Option to reveal report to students





Accessing Turnitin results

The below steps will focus only on those steps that differ for the purpose of using SpeedGrader to view Turnitin assignment results. For detailed steps on this, please see How to use SpeedGrader

You can access the results of the Turnitin review in SpeedGrader for the assignment

  • Within SpeedGrader, if you see a clock icon next to the student submission. This indicates that Turnitin is currently checking the submission for plagiarism.

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Clock icon SpeedGrader


  • When Turnitin has completed the check, this area will display a plagiarism score for you to review.


Turnitin Score


  • Click on this percentage score to be brought to the original report



For more information on this, please see our article on How to access your Turnitin results.