Faculty may use Turnitin SimCheck to determine whether a student plagiarized an assignment. However, according to Turnitin, a “similarity score is a percentage of a paper's content that matches to Turnitin's databases; it is not an assessment of whether the paper includes plagiarized material.” Therefore faculty will need to take additional steps to determine whether plagiarism may have occurred. Next steps often include speaking with the student about the submitted assignment.

Some faculty recognize that student citation skills may be undeveloped and choose to use Turnitin to support academic integrity. After submitting an assignment, students can view the similarity report and use it to address lapses in citations in their work.

Please see Academic Integrity at UO for support in determining whether a student may have violated academic integrity policy. The page includes resources for communicating and designing for academic integrity.

If you decide to enable SimCheck, please consider adding a statement on your syllabus notifying students that you will be using it.

To enable SimCheck in Canvas, follow the steps below.

1. Navigate to your Canvas course.
2. Click Assignments in the left course navigation.
3. Click the +Assignment button at the top right.
4. Next to Submission type, select either Text entry or File uploads.
5. Next to Plagiarism Review, choose SimCheck.
6. Customize Turnitin plagiarism settings: exclusion options, submission indexing options, and similarity report availability options.
7. Choose when you want to show reports to students. If using SimCheck to help students improve their citation practices, select Immediately and allow multiple attempts. This allows students to revise and resubmit the assignment based on the similarity report.

To access the similarity report, follow the steps below.

1. Navigate to your Canvas course.
2. Click Assignments in the left course navigation.
3. Click the name of the assignment for which you enabled SimCheck.
4. Click SpeedGrader at the top right.
5. On the right part of the screen, under Submitted Files, click the button with a percentage. If you hover your mouse over this button, it will display the text Similarity Score - see detailed report. If the button is grey and does not have a percentage, this means the similarity report has not yet generated. While reports usually generate quickly, it can take up to 24 hours to generate.

Turnitin has created a new, enhanced similarity report. This report works with assistive technologies, such as screen readers, and includes other enhancements. Using the new report is optional, and Turnitin has not announced plans to depreciate the classic similarity report.

To interpret the similarity report, follow the steps below.

1. After accessing the similarity report, note the assignment’s similarity score, which ranges from 0% to 100% and is color coded:
   1. Blue: No matching text
   2. Green: One word to 24% matching text
   3. Yellow: 25-49% matching text
   4. Orange: 50-74% matching text
   5. Red: 75-100% matching text
2. According to Turnitin, a “similarity score is a percentage of a paper's content that matches to Turnitin's databases; it is not an assessment of whether the paper includes plagiarized material.” Therefore faculty will need to do the following to assess whether plagiarism may have occurred:
   1. View similarity matches
   2. View sources
   3. Refine the similarity report
   4. Exclude quotes and bibliographic material

Please note that if a submitted assignment matches content in the University of Oregon's private database, you will not be able to see information about the author of the original submission.