Free Turnitin Review: Access, Benefits, Shortcomings, Alternatives, How to Use It
What is Turnitin?
Turnitin is simply a software that is used to check and generate plagiarism report from the documents submitted by the students.
It is a Text Matching Software that helps the students to detect the levels of similarity in the student papers.
Apart from showing the overall similarity levels (in terms of the percentages), the Turnitin plagiarism report also shows the links and sources where the suspected information is drawn from.
Turnitin Company was formed in the year 1997 and so far, more than 30 million students together with 15,000 learning institutions are licensed the use of this software. Read the useful article below!
How Turnitin Works
As stated above, Turnitin is basically a Text Matching Software that compares text with other existing text elsewhere.
Watch this YouTube Video on How Turnitin Works
Turnitin software checks the potentially non original content through the use of proprietary algorithm.
The Turnitin software is designed to scan its own database containing millions of student’s papers together with other online databases to come up with a proper plagiarism report.
Access to Turnitin
Access to Turnitin is only available through licensing the software. First, it is good to know that Turnitin software is not licensed to individuals.
The company only gives the software license to educational institutions.
The cost of licensing the software also varies depending on the number of students an institution houses.
Usually, the cost of Turnitin license costs thousands of dollars (mostly out of research even to some small institutions)
When an institution gets the Turnitin license, they are now given the freedom to create as many user profiles as possible.
Turnitin allows three profiles to be create: The student profile, the instructor profile, and the teaching assistant profile.
You can watch the video below on how to ACCESS TURNITIN
Despite the different user profiles, the functionality and the report they generate still remains the same. The only difference is the user interface.
If you are using Turnitin as a student, they you are required to input the class ID and the Enrollment Password.
As mentioned above, access to Turnitin login details is highly restricted and most students cannot be granted access.
GOOD NEWS is that we have a licensed Turnitin that we use to help student check their papers before making the final submission.
Just read to the end and you will get to know how to access Turnitin for personal use.
Turnitin Alternatives
There are so many Turnitin Alternatives outside there. To be precise, there are more than 50 plagiarism checking software outside there.
However, the mail Turnitin Alternatives are Grammarly and CopyScape.
Grammarly is an online software that doubles as a grammar checker and plagiarism checker.
The main advantage of using Grammarly is that it provides the double check; in that apart from just checking the plagiarism in the paper, it also checks for grammatical mistakes and make suggestions where necessary.
The main weakness of Grammarly is that it does not have a large paper database, and this limits its ability to compare the paper uploaded in it exhaustively.
It mainly compares the paper uploaded it with other online content, cannot check repository plagiarism.
Therefore, a student who uses Grammarly is likely to submit a paper that is free from grammatical mistakes, but not necessarily free from plagiarism.
So, if we compare Grammarly with Turnitin, then Turnitin is still superior when it comes to checking for plagiarism.
CopyScape is also another popular plagiarism checking software used by many students.
CopyScape is a software developed by Indigo Technologies to check whether a content appears elsewhere on the web.
CopyScape is mostly used by bloggers to check whether their content has been copied by another blog.
The main shortcoming of CopyScape is that it does not have a database, so it cannot be used to effectively check students’ papers against those other papers that were initially submitted for marking.
As you can see from the above description, CopyScape is good for blogging, not academic papers.
Since it lacks a database, it may not be effectively in checking plagiarism.
My take is, Turnitin is still superior to both Grammarly and CopyScape.
What are the Benefits of Turnitin?
There are several benefits associated with the use of Turnitin as explained below!
- Quality: The quality of the report produced by Turnitin report is the best due to its extensive comparison over the web archives and the student databases
- Speed: Turnitin plagiarism report is usually generated within less than 5 minutes. You don’t need to wait for many hours to get your report.
- No limit: Unlike many other plagiarism checkers that can only check up to a certain number of words or pages, TURNITIN can check any document no matter how long it looks.
- Detailed Report: Turnitin plagiarism report highlights all the plagiarized sentences and the areas where those sentences show similarity.
- Trusted: Turnitin is the only plagiarism checker used by universities. The implication is that the report you get from your personal plagiarism check will not differ with the report your tutor will get when you submit the paper, so no risk of getting shocked with different results.
What are the Shortcomings of Turnitin?
Turnitin is an advanced software that has undergone massive improvements to enabled it to enhance the user experience and improve the quality of their service.
However, it has some few limitations outlined below!
First, Turnitin Plagiarism Checker has no additional functionality. It only checks your paper for plagiarism and nothing more. Some plagiarism checkers have additional functionality such as the capability to check your paper for grammatical mistakes.
The second shortcoming associated with over reliable on Turnitin is that the software is constantly under maintenance as they attempt to improve on their systems.
Therefore, there are several instances within the year when the software is down and cannot be quickly accessed by students and instructors who needs to check their papers.
Such interruptions may be costly for those students who wanted to check their papers urgently.
In order to avoid such inconveniences, it is necessary to plan early and check your papers many hours or even days before the submission day.
How do you read the Turnitin Report?
The first thing you need to do when you want to read the Turnitin report is to check the overall plagiarism score.
The overall Turnitin plagiarisms score often rangers between 0-100%
0% represents original document with no plagiarism whatsoever
100% plagiarism represent a fully plagiarized content (word by word) from another source.
It is advisable to submit a paper that is 5% plagiarized or less (0-5%), otherwise you risk losing marks. You need to be conversant with the acceptable plagiarism percentage at this level of reading.
FREE Turnitin Access?
Getting Turnitin Access is only a preserve for those who have access to Turnitin license.
There are two main ways of getting access to FREE TURNITIN for students!
OPTION #1: If you are a student, then you can easily get Turnitin Access when your university buys the Turnitin license. You can easily confirm this by contacting your university librarian.
In case your university has a licensed Turnitin, then your university librarian cane helps you to check your paper or provide you the enrollment key where you can create your own Turnitin account for use as a student.
OPTION #2: This second option applies to those students whose universities have not bought the Turnitin license or the university policy does not allow them to use Turnitin.
Remember, there are some universities where the right to use Turnitin is only a reserve for the Tutors and administrators, not the students. This option involves contacting a Turnitin reseller like us to give you the logins.
How to access Turnitin for Personal Use
Like we have said above, you can still use Turnitin to check your papers even if you can’t get access at your university.
We have a licensed Turnitin plagiarism software that we use to help those students who cannot get access to Turnitin.
All you need to do is to contact us or send to us an email to turnitinexperthelper@gmail.com with the paper that needs to be checked.
We will then check the paper and send to you the PDF copy of the plagiarism report.
After accessing the Turnitin Plagiarism Report, you can also email us if you need professional plagiarism removal services.
Feel free to contact us or leave a comment if you want a Turnitin Account