About Turnitin for students

     Turnitin is an effective learning tool that can help improve students' academic writing skills by allowing students to see errors in their work in terms of correct and incorrect citations. Turnitin gives students a chance to revise their work prior to final submission for assessment.

     Students at Cuyamaca College submit most or all of their written take-home assignments to their instructor through Turnitin. Students can upload their assignments from home or at the computer lab, located in the H-building.

     Turnitin then compares the work for sentence or phrase matches against three databases: a comprehensive Internet snapshot, a library of published articles, and a pool of millions of previously submitted student papers. The instructor receives a "Similarity Index" (see illustration) for each submitted student work and a percentage of the work that contains plagiarized material.