What is the threshold for turnitin? If I am over 20% is that bad? 30%? etc?

[TEOKyeLi]

If I am over 20% is that bad? 30%? etc?

[TEOKyeLi]

And do we go off the total % or the highest individual %?

[ericwhitmer · Accepted solution]

You'll need to reach out to your instructor because they're the ones who usually specify the threshold of the similarity score. This will also fall under your institution's academic integrity policies of what is acceptable from them and what is acceptable to your instructor.

[chriscas]

I totally agree with this.  it's usually a teacher/faculty decision around what is okay and what is not (and could vary based on the assignment).  There may be some overarching academic integrity policy to give a little guidance, but those don't generally mention a specific percentage or anything.  As a Canvas admin, I would tell you that the number should be as close to 0 as possible.

I am slightly confused because you mention multiple numbers.  There should only be one similarity score from turnitin, but you mention an individual score and a total.  Maybe your school is using a different version of Turnitin than what we are.

Good luck with your assignment though!

-Chris

[TEOKyeLi]

The similarity report shows all sources from which I am similar, for example I may be 1% similar to another paper and on a separate paper I am 5% similar, it shows a total at the top of 6% similar.

[chriscas]

Hi @TEOKyeLi,

Ah, I understand what you mean now.  Again, this is really something to ask your teacher directly since everyone *could* do things differently, but in my experience as an administrator, almost every teacher I know will look at the overall/total number.  They should look to verify that something like a missing quotation mark is not throwing off the score though.

Look at it this way...  If someone took a single sentence from 100 different websites to create a paper, and that's their entire paper (unlikely, but just for arguement's sake), Turnitin would show 1% for those 100 different websites individually, but 100% for the total.  Teachers usually don't want students copying from other sources without quotes and citations, so from that perspective, the paper would really be 100% plagiarized.  The same logic likely applies in cases where the numbers are smaller (only 5 sites at 2% each for different parts of the paper would be 10% total, and that 10% is what the teacher would likely consider).

Hope this helps, but just to reiterate one more time, you really should talk directly to your teacher about this, as they generally get to decide what is acceptable or not for each assignment in the the class.

-Chris