20% similarity?!

Gonna make it quick:
• I’ve done my first uni assignment
• I used turnitin (we have to basically)
• Submitted my first draft
• 20% similarity, and it’s marked sentences that I’ve quoted & cited and it’s marked my bibliography.
• What the hell?!

Reply 1

Mr Wednesday

Original post by It'sjoe

Its doing its job, which is to flag up and identify the source of stuff it recognises. What it can't do on its own is tell if thats ok or not, it has no inteligence as such and does not know what you mean.

If its all properly cited and references you will be fine when a real human looks at it - thats the next stage of review. That 20% score would be a definite invite to me if I was the marker, but it sounds like you are ok here. Well references works will _always_ have a non zero Turnitin score as it picks up strings and key-words from the Biblio at the very least. I have seen it flag up scales on graphs as they go 1, 2, 3, 4 or similar and "somewhere" another student has used that :smile:

Reply 2

bones-mccoy

Anything lower than 30% on Turnitin isn't a massive issue, my course handed in our first piece of coursework a few weeks ago and we all had similarity scores of 20-30% yet nothing was mentioned in feedback

Reply 3

Mr Wednesday

Original post by bones-mccoy

It depends on what that 30% is. I have seen cases where 5% has ended up with a student heading for an uncomfortable meeting with the academic integrity officer, because that 5% was all from one block of continuous, non-acknowledged cut n' paste from a web site. Its not the % number on its own, high-ish scores can be perfectly fine, its what that actually represents on the page that matters.

(edited 4 years ago)

Reply 4

Reality Check

Original post by Mr Wednesday

It depends on what that 30% is. I have seen cases where 5% has ended up with a student heading for an uncomfortable meeting with the academic integrity officer, because that 5% was all from one block of continuous, one non-acknowledged cut n' paste from a web site. Its not the % number on its own, high-ish scores can be perfectly fine, its what that actually represents on the page that matters.

Yes, this is it. I think students sometimes think Turnitin is magic or something.

Reply 5

bones-mccoy

Original post by Mr Wednesday

It depends on what that 30% is. I have seen cases where 5% has ended up with a student heading for an uncomfortable meeting with the academic integrity officer, because that 5% was all from one block of continuous, one non-acknowledged cut n' paste from a web site. Its not the % number on its own, high-ish scores can be perfectly fine, its what that actually represents on the page that matters.

That's true. All of our percentages included the references which obviously can't be plagerised as that's what they're there for.

Reply 6

Mr Wednesday

Original post by bones-mccoy

All of our percentages included the references which obviously can't be plagerised as that's what they're there for.

And that itself is an interesting marker. For lab reports, lit reviews, dissertations etc a zero turnitin score is actually rather bad. It says "no references included", or the bibliography is so badly mangled that a computer code that spends all its time looking for something it recognises cant find a journal name, paper title, three author names in a row or the DOI.

Reply 7

hallamstudents

Official Rep

Hey.

Like the others say, it's entirely dependent on what it flags up.
I regularly used to turn in 20% plagiarised essays, and it can be from the title of the essay, random words being flagged. All sorts.
When a marker looks at it, I am sure it will be fine.

If you find you have a sentence (of non-quoted) plagiarised work, best to get on that!!
Joshua :biggrin: