12. Plagiarism and Referencing

12.4. How we use the information provided by Turnitin

Only academic staff will make a judgement on whether plagiarism has occurred in a piece of work. An academic may interpret the originality report to help but Turnitin itself does not make this judgement.

We do not use a threshold percentage to identify whether plagiarism has occurred and may review any originality report in detail.

Turnitin will highlight matching text such as references, quotations, common phrases and data tables within work that has no plagiarism issues at all. Those interpreting Turnitin reports will discount such matches and so initial percentages are often irrelevant.

Where it is suspected that plagiarism has occurred in a piece of work, the originality report may be submitted to the Head of School and possibly to an Assessment Offences Panel for further investigation.