What is Turnitin?
Turnitin is a Web-based service that can find and highlight matching or unoriginal text in a written assignment. It uses data-mining to compile a large database of electronic academic materials which it indexes and stores. Faculty can send their students’ assignments to the Turnitin database or else set up to allow students to send their own assignments to the service for checking.
Turnitin basically checks the assignment against its database of materials to look for matches or near-matches in strings of text. Turnitin then generates an Similarity Report online. The Similarity Report summarizes and highlights matching text.
Similarity reports are typically completed within ten to fifteen minutes of submissions. However, please note that similarity reports for resubmitted assignments take 24 hours to regenerate. If ample time has passed, click on the Refresh button in the top right-hand corner. Refreshing the submissions inbox will look through the current submissions that are in the inbox and check for any changes. If there is something different, it will refresh the inbox.
Using Turnitin within Blackboard (for Faculty)