Submitted by: Michael Mills, mmills@uca.edu on 08/14/2026
When we moved from Blackboard to Brightspace, we lost SafeAssign, the plagiarism checker many of you had built into your assignments. UCA has now licensed iThenticate, a text-matching tool from Turnitin, and it is live and available to all faculty as of this month. You can sign in at universityofcentralarkansas.turnitin.com using the Google single sign-on option with your UCA credentials. There is no separate password to set up.
Before you dive in, a few things to know, because iThenticate does not work the way SafeAssign did:
– It is a separate website. It is not integrated with Brightspace and will not appear inside your courses.
– Nothing runs automatically. You upload a file yourself when you want it checked, so think of it as a tool you reach for rather than a net that catches everything.
– Students have no access and see no results.
– Past submissions from Blackboard did not carry over, so prior UCA student work is not in the database. If you are trying to compare a paper against one from an earlier semester, use the doc-to-doc comparison feature and supply the earlier paper yourself.
– iThenticate will not flag AI-generated writing.
One important reminder: a similarity score tells you how much text matches other sources. It is not a plagiarism finding, and interpreting it is still your call.
Full instructions for signing in, uploading a document, and reading a Similarity Report are here: https://uca.edu/researchcompliance/ithenticate/
Live training with Turnitin is set for Monday, September 8 at 12:30 p.m. on Zoom: https://turnitin.zoom.us/j/96191105867. No registration needed. You do not have to wait for the training to start using the tool.