Adjusting Your Turnitin Assignment Settings

We suggest the following settings for best results:

• Ensure that the drop-down menu for Store Submissions in has Institution paper repository selected.
  NOTE: See the Paper Repository: To Store or Not to Store? section below for more details

• Under Compare submissions against, ensure that all four boxes are checked.
• Under Similarity Report:
  
  • Select Exclude bibliographic materials
  • Select Exclude quoted materials
  • Choose if you would like to Exclude small sources
    The recommendation is to check the checkbox, select Words, with a Set source exclusion threshold of 4 words.
    Excluding small matches prevents common phrases or word pairings from appearing in the Originality Report.
• Select Save as default settings.
• Choose if you would like to Show originality report to the students.

Paper Repository: To Store or Not to Store?

Turnitin checks paper submissions against its databases. One of those databases is Northwestern’s institutional paper repository, where student papers get stored once submitted in order to compare against future student papers.

Turnitin allows you to specify if you would like the papers from your assignments stored in Northwestern's repository. A use case where you would not want students' papers stored in the repository is when checking drafts of students' papers. Drafts that are stored in the repository could create a false positive in the Turnitin Similarity Report once students submit the final versions of their paper.

Creating & Evaluating Turnitin Assignments

1. Creating a Turnitin Assignment in Canvas
2. Adjusting Your Turnitin Assignment Settings
3. Evaluating a Turnitin Assignment