Canvas: SimCheck Plagarism Detection

SimCheck by TurnItIn (formerly VeriCite) makes it easy to identify and investigate possible plagiarism in the papers your students submit. It’s a tool embedded in your learning platform that turns potentially negative situations into positive teaching moments, changing the conversation from “caught you” to “taught you.” SimCheck helps teach the value of academic integrity as part of a broad approach that includes well-designed assignments, resources on proper citations and instructor-student conversations.

The use of SimCheck is entirely optional. You can use it in one assignment and not another.

Your first step is to decide whether to use SimCheck. If you use SimCheck in your assignments, make sure that your students are aware that their work is being checked and that they have access to resources about properly citing the works of others.

CAUTION: In April, 2023, TurnItIn added "AI Writing Detection" to the St. Thomas license. This feature could not be removed and company reps told ITS that it would remain available through December, 2023.  On January 1, 2024 the company announced that they had removed it.  In testing it, ITS found cases of students' original writing erroneously flagged as AI-generated. Do not assume SimCheck's "AI" results were accurate.

How to Enable SimCheck for an Assignment: 

1. Go to your Canvas course
2. Create an assignment as usual, making sure you change the assignment Submission Type to Online using the drop-down menu.
3. Choose Text Entry, File Upload, or both. When you do this, a "Plagiarism Review" section will appear below "Submission Attempts"
4. In the Plagiarism Review section, select "SimCheck by TurnItIn" in the drop-down menu and choose your desired options.
5. Make sure to publish the assignment
6. Your students can submit papers as soon as the assignment is available.

To view SimCheck reports:

• The link to the SimCheck report will display in Speedgrader and in the Grades area. Click on the SimCheck report link to open the report.
• Explore the results by clicking on sentences in the report or by clicking on a source in the source comparison panel. You can exclude specific sources or sentences from the report. Also, you can use the comment feature to add annotations to the report.

Interpreting the SimCheck report

SimCheck scores each sentence by the matches that are found in TurnItIn’s massive index of public resources, in Microsoft’s Bing search index and in your institution’s private repository of student papers submitted to SimCheck. Sentences are color coded from low to high match.

It’s up to you to determine if the paper includes inappropriately used content. Any sentence that is scored as a high match is worth investigating. A paper with several medium match sentences may suggest some paraphrasing or patch writing. Plagiarism can be accidental as well. Generally, if the submitted paper is scored above 15% (under “Details” in the report) you should investigate the sources. You can click on each sentence to find its corresponding match; you can click on matching materials to find the corresponding sentences.