Can I use Turnitin for my thesis or other research outside the classroom?

UC Berkeley’s use of Turnitin is exclusively licensed for classroom use in which a student submits work overseen by an instructor. For this reason, we are unable to support use cases where a single user is both submitting work, and reviewing their own similarity reports.

 

However, we recognize the value that Turnitin offers so that all students can ensure that citations in their work are properly identified and formatted. In order to provide graduate and doctoral students who may not have an existing bCourses site to generate similarity reports, we recommend:

1. The student must work with an advisor or sponsor who creates a bCourses project site
   • How do I create a project site?
2. By default, project sites do not include Turnitin, so the advisor should email the project site URL to bcourseshelp@berkeley.edu and ask that Turnitin be enabled.
3. The advisor can then create one or more assignment with Turnitin enabled, and configured to display reports to students
   • As an Instructor, how do I enable and configure Turnitin in bCourses?
   • In this scenario, it is likely that the instructor will want to configure these submissions to not be stored in the campus Turnitin repository.
4. The student can use this assignment to submit their work and generate reports, and the advisor/sponsor’s involvement and oversight will satisfy the terms of our license