Understanding Grammarly & Turnitin

Grammarly and Turnitin are tools to help you check your assignments for similarity and avoid plagiarism.

On this page you'll learn how each of these tools work, when to use them, and how they are different.

Throughout this guide the terms similarity and plagiarism are used.

It is important to know that similarity is not plagiarism. Grammarly and Turnitin do not detect plagiarism. Instead, they look for similarity by matching any text that appears elsewhere, whether or not it is truly plagiarised.

It is up to you and your instructor to determine if anything has been plagiarised.

Grammarly and Turnitin do not detect plagiarism or judge which items are plagiarised.
They will match any text that appears, whether or not it was plagiarised.

Academic integrity is the practice of approaching the work you do with honesty, fairness, and a commitment to ensuring you give credit to others for the work or ideas you have used in developing an argument or completing an assignment.

Plagiarism is the act of using someone else's words, ideas, or information without acknowledgement or by passing them off as your own. Plagiarism can be done purposefully or accidentally, and it often happens because of incorrect citing.

At UCW, APA style is the standard citation style for all classes. It is always best to cite as you write, keep track of your sources, and avoid plagiarism from the beginning.

It is always your own responsibility to cite your sources correctly and avoid plagiarism.
These tools are intended to be a guide. Always double-check your work. Do not rely solely on them to prevent you from plagiarising.

The library has a guide introducing the core concepts of academic integrity and how to avoid plagiarism by citing your sources using APA style.

• What is Academic Integrity?
• How Do I Cite Sources?
• What is APA Citation?

UCW has access to two tools that can help you check your assignments for text-matching and similarity: Grammarly and Turnitin

Grammarly and Turnitin do not detect plagiarism or judge which items are plagiarised. Instead, they look for similarity by matching any text that appears elsewhere, whether or not it is truly plagiarised. It is up to you and your instructor to determine if anything has been plagiarised.

Use Grammarly with your Microsoft 365 account. Contact IT Resources if you have questions. Click here to learn more.

UCW instructors use Turnitin to check student assignments and generate an originality report. Click here to learn more.

Grammarly provides suggestions to improve writing style, spot grammatical errors, fix spelling and punctuation mistakes. It also has a built-in plagiarism feature called a plagiarism-checker which is a text-matching (or similarity) tool. When you check your paper, Grammarly scans its database of webpages to check if there are any items with matching text. Any matching sections will then be flagged as potential plagiarism.

Grammarly may give different similarity percentages compared to Turnitin. Do not rely only on Grammarly to catch plagiarism before you submit to Turnitin.

Turnitin is a tool used by UCW instructors to check student assignments and generate an originality report by flagging areas of concern. It will highlight the areas of your paper that match text from Turnitin's large database and assign a percentage to the matching text within your assignment. Your professor makes the final decision about whether matching text or a high similarity percentage is the result of plagiarism.

Instructors can control Turnitin's submission settings, including similarity percentages, reference lists, resubmitting assignments, etc. These settings may vary from class to class.

While both Grammarly and Turnitin check assignments for similarity, they are separate tools and work differently! They are automated tools and are not perfect. They will not return the same similarity percentages and will not be 100% correct all of the time.

Comparing Grammarly vs. Turnitin

*Information retrieved from Grammarly.com and Turnitin.com as of March 24, 2025*

Here is a sample paper that was submitted to Grammarly and Turnitin with different results. Sometimes the plagiarism was missed completely, and sometimes the text matches are not plagiarism.

You can compare these results with the highlighted paper, which highlights the plagiarism and improper citations:

• Sample Paper: Grammarly (6% plagiarism)
• Sample Paper: Turnitin (19% plagiarism)
• Sample Paper: Plagiarism Highlighted (40% plagiarism)

Remember!
Even if Grammarly or Turnitin misses plagiarism, that does not mean your instructor will miss it as well.

It's important to remember that both Grammarly and Turnitin are AI tools.

Grammarly uses natural language processing AI techniques to provide grammar, spelling and other writing suggestions, while Turnitin uses AI to detect AI-written content from human-written content. This means that if you use Grammarly to substantially change your writing and sentence structure, there is a risk that it may be detected by Turnitin as AI writing.

Alternatives to Grammarly

While Grammarly can be seen as a quick fix to help your writing, it may not be the best tool. Another option is to make an appointment or visit a drop-in session with the UCW Writing Coaches. The Writing Coaches can help guide you through the academic writing process and learn self-editing skills, avoiding the need for Grammarly!

If you still want to use Grammarly, watch the Writing Coaches Set up Grammarly Editor Settings video on how to set up your Grammarly account to reduce AI similiarity.

Plus remember to always talk to your instructor if you have questions about what is allowed and not allowed for your assignments.

Check out this guide introducing artificial intelligence (AI) tools to learn how to engage with AI in an ethical way.

• UCW Library's Artificial Intelligence Subject Guide