This article is about the plagiarism checker in Brightspace; as of 4 May 2026, we have switched from Ouriginal to Turnitin. Read this article when you want to know more about creating an assignment with TurnItIn and this article if you want to know more about viewing and interpreting the Similarity Report.
The problem has been resolved.
Students no longer need to manually accept the EULA (End User License Agreement) to use the plagiarism scanner. The submission and review process is now working as intended.
For assignments where work has already been submitted and students have not accepted the EULA (before the fix), follow these steps to generate a similarity report:
- Navigate to the relevant assignment in Brightspace and select Edit Assignment
- Click “Evaluation & Feedback,” then click the three dots next to TurnItIn and select Disable
- Click Save and Close and wait a few minutes
- Repeat the steps, but this time select Add External Tool
Please have a look at this article for more information on interpreting the report.
Currently it's not yet possible to link TurnItIn to a group assignment. The supplier will add this feature in July 2026.
If you get an error when launching Turnitin (such as "Invalid or missing state"), please clear your cookies and try again in Edge, Chrome or Firefox.
Absolutely. During the migration, Turnitin downloaded all files from Ouriginal and scanned them into the Turnitin database. So, as a student, you cannot simply copy a whole paper from 2020; that work will also be ‘detected’.
After 30 June (2026), TurnitIn will disable the Ouriginal environment (TurnitIn has acquired Ouriginal). This means that after 30 June, Ouriginal will no longer work for users. The advantage is that you can enable TurnitIn even after a student has submitted an assignment.
After 30 June, you will no longer be able to access reports generated by Ouriginal. If you still wish to view an old report, you can submit a request to Brightspace Functional Management (FUB). FUB has a temporary archive account that allows old reports to be viewed and downloaded. However, the Functional Administrators cannot guarantee that all requests will be accepted, as the supplier may sometimes need to be involved.
The Turnitin algorithm searches for sources with a high percentage of similarity. For example, a similar text might be found on Wikipedia, but also in three different journals. Turnitin will display Wikipedia as Level 1 because it contains the most similar text, but not in terms of source; whereas the others would be displayed as Level 2 because they contain similar text but differ in terms of source.
A file may be up to 200MB in size. TurnitIn supports the following file formats: .doc, .docx, .xls, .xlsx, .sxw, .pptx, .pdf, .pdf2.0, .txt, .rtf, .html, .htm, .wps, .odt, .odp, .ods, .tif, .tiff, .ps, .hwp and .pages.
Turnitin accepts PDFs, but some files have been converted to PDF using a legitimate or illegitimate PDF converter. Files originating from illegitimate converters will contain characters that cannot be parsed and will therefore be rejected by the system. Images are also rejected. Files submitted to Turnitin must not be protected or encrypted.
This means that the work has been copied from a student’s copyright-protected work and therefore cannot be opened. You can check the name and source of the data to see whether the file belongs to THUAS or another organisation.
Anyone with a teaching role in a Brightspace course (Instructors and Guest Lecturers) has access to Turnitin compliance reports.
Self-plagiarism occurs when a student submits the same (or updated) document for an assignment where plagiarism detection has been enabled by a different instructor, regardless of the course in which that assignment was set. In such cases, the ‘recipient’ (instructor) may choose to exclude a source via the ‘sources’ tab in the relevant report so that it is not considered plagiarism.
It is not considered plagiarism if a student submits a file multiple times for an assignment where the plagiarism check has been enabled by the same tutor.
It is recommended that only one tutor enables the plagiarism check for all relevant assignments.