How is it that Turnitin often shows similiarities (usually strings of words, sentences or half sentences) in work done by students at other universities and I am unable to see the work? I have the same access to any subsriptions offered at my uni that the students have. There is no way that students in the country where I teach would pay money to access an article at, say, Marquette University, just to cheat. I'm thinking that a Marquette Uni student (other schools also) plagiarised the same string of words from the Internet, but why doesn't Turnitin show that source? I don't think my students are miraculously writing the same sentences as students at other schools. And does this infer that the work that is showing as similiar has also been submitted via Moodle?
Thanks for your reply. I think I will be taking that grain of salt. 😄
*Within* an institution you can typically see this, but no cross institutions. And after all it's *that* institution's data (in fact it's *that specific user's* data).
As for why TII might not show the "internet" source, it may never have scanned that for itself, the only evidence of it is from another student's submission. It's not like a diligent researcher who then goes and follows up the original source.
The interpretation of what an originality report is actually showing is a bit of a black art, and it's not all represented in the sources and percentage match. There are legitimate cases for higher matches.
>And does this infer that the work that is showing as similiar has also been submitted via Moodle?
No. Turnitin has many routes for content to enter it's matching database: all of the LMS integrations, Internet scanning etc. Entry into the TII database isn't a function of Moodle per se.