By clicking on the report link (the percentage icon) in the assignment's home page listing, the report can be accessed. Depending upon which link you pressed on the assignment page, you may or may not have to press the 'originality' button shown in red at top left to show all the matches.
Providing that the correct defaults been set for the assignment, this report will now exclude parts of the work that are quoted and bibliographies, and so the matching shown is the actual extent of matching. In the example below, which is a very small report with a lot of famous quotes in it, most of which have not been properly referenced in order to show what happens when you do this. The two unoriginal parts that are properly referenced - the quote by Margaret Mitchell in the middle and by Winston Churchill at the end are not picked up as matches, which is correct. The unattributed text appears as a coloured link, and a place on the internet or elsewhere where the text was found is shown on the right for each thing found. The percentage of the text found to match something is given as a score at top-right, along with the percentages found in different types of location. In our experience, most stuff that is not original is found, but Turnitin's searches are not infalible1. This is shown here in that 3 famous quotes to the right of the picture of the Wellington Cable Car were not matched with the internet - despite the fact that I got them from the internet.
Your interpretation of what is found is the most important part of the entire process, and we look at this next in 6: Analysing Results .
1 Turnitin will find most of the material placed on the internet. There are one or two exceptions. These include material that has only just been placed there - the company that runs Turnitin doesn't reveal its algorithm, but we've found material put on-line in the past week isn't picked up. Another exception are said to be essay banks - these are said to detect the type of detailed rapid network scan that search engines like the one Turnitin use and hide things from them. We also believe that it is weak at picking up stuff that is contained within Wikis and Blogs.
One really good thing is that if you know that students are lookng at a particular website, and Turnitin isn't detecting it, you can ask the local Turnitin support to contact the UK Turnitin support (at detection@nlearning.co.uk), and ask them to add the web site to their database - see following letter, received from UK Support in Northumbria:
Hi Mike
The material on this website may not have been seen because the crawlers may not have attempted to crawl it yet.
It may also be possible that the crawler has attempted to crawl the site but it has found that it does not have permission to crawl this section of the website.
It is possible to feed a URL to the crawler manually andI can enter any URL to be crawled at your request.
I have fed the URL you have provided me to the crawler and I will check to see if this has been added to the Turnitin database.
If you send through the URLs that you would like to be included in the internet database I can feed these to the crawler too.
Looking at a Turnitin Report