Students Using Turnitin in BlueQuill (integrated Turnitin)

Audience: BlueQuill students with courses that utilize Turnitin.com integration for their assignments.

Disclaimer: Integrated Turnitin in courses means that next to the Submit button for a BlueQuill assignment, there will be a Turnitin button. However, if your instructor wishes for you to turn in your assignment directly to the turnitin.com website, your course may be using non-integrated Turnitin. For instructions on using non-integrated Turnitin: Click Here

This process is different when using Canvas instead of BlueQuill.

In this article:

1. Turnitin.com Overview
2. Identifying a Turnitin Assignment
3. Submitting Papers in Turnitin
4. Submitting Papers for Grading

Turnitin.com Overview

Turnitin.com is a site that BlueQuill instructors and students can utilize to check for originality within a document. Since plagiarism is not always intentional, this tool helps students protect themselves from possible plagiarism scenarios, but also helps instructors identify clear attempts to plagiarize. Students will upload their papers to this site, which will then take a few minutes (sometimes longer) to analyze the paper. It will then return a percentage of the paper that was possibly plagiarized and identify any areas that may need to be edited to reduce plagiarism. Many instructors will provide a max percentage that students can reach before submitting the final assignment. Once the percentage is within the acceptable range, students will then submit the final paper to BlueQuill.

Identifying a Turnitin Assignment

Some assignments may require you to submit your paper through Turnitin.com before you submit it to BlueQuill for grading. To submit a paper through Turnitin inside of BlueQuill, your course must be setup to properly allow submissions to Turnitin.com. If you are unsure if your course has Turnitin integration, look for the "Turnitin" button (as seen below) within your assignment page or ask your instructor.

When you submit a paper to Turnitin using the steps below, an account with Turnitin is registered using your student email. While you may be used to going to Turnitin.com directly and logging in with your student email or other email accounts, this process is different. Therefore, you may not have the same experience and functionality as if you logged directly into the site. 

Submitting Papers in Turnitin

If an assignment requires students to use Turnitin before the assignment is submitted in BlueQuill, they can do so by:

1. Clicking on the Turnitin button from within the object. It will take them directly to the assignment in Turnitin.com.
   
   • If you see the error below, your instructor has not yet turned on submissions for the assignment within Turnitin.com. If your instructor needs help with this, you can point them to our article: Instructors Using Turnitin.
     
2. Then, use one of the options (file upload, text input, or cloud submission) to upload your content for review.
   • It usually takes couple minutes to get the originality report from the website. Based on the feedback from the report, students can make changes and re-submit as needed.
   • NOTE: The re-submission will erase the previous upload.
     
3. After uploading your file, your originality report will come out looking something like this:
   
   
   • This provides a digital receipt for your proof of submission. If instructors require the originality report to be included with the assignment submission in BlueQuill, then you can download the report by clicking the download icon outlined in the image above.
   • The red bar and the "93%" text indicates that your submission highly reflects other information found from other sources. This would be an indication to your professor that there is a high amount of plagiarism within your submission.
   • Most instructors will suggest working to get your originality report somewhere below 25%. 
   • Some suggestions for lowering the matching percentage score:
     • Don't include questions or prompts in your submission. By putting the questions from your assignment into your submission, this will likely cause your submission to look a lot like other student submissions.
     • Check your report for any highlighted areas of concern. You may need to rewrite a section in your own words or remove/shorten quotes.
     • Make sure you are citing any sources that you gathered information from.

For more information about understanding your originality score, please click here.  

Submitting Papers for Grading

Submitting a paper to Turnitin.com in any capacity is not the same as submitting a paper in BlueQuill to be graded by your professor. If you are required to submit your paper to Turnitin to check for originality, you will still need to submit your paper separately in BlueQuill to be graded. To learn about how  to submit assignments to BlueQuill, view our article Submitting Assignments.