A Turnitin percentage on its own tells you almost nothing — it counts every quote, every correctly cited source and every stock phrase your discipline uses, alongside the matches that actually matter. Every assignment we deliver comes with the full similarity report, not just the number, so you can see which matches are real before you submit.
This page explains how the check works and how to read the report we send you. It is not legal or academic advice, and it is not a guarantee about how your specific university will treat any given score — that judgement sits with your institution's own policy.
Every assignment ships with a similarity report and an AI-writing indicator read, so you can see exactly what a marker would see before you submit — not after.
Assignment Byte is an independent academic support service, not Turnitin, iThenticate or any university's own integrity office, and we do not control how a receiving institution reads either report. Read more on how similarity checks work, what an AI-writing indicator actually measures, and your institution's academic integrity policy before you submit anything.
Turnitin (and the similarity engines like it) compares your text against a huge index of student papers, journals, websites and previously submitted work, and reports what fraction of your document overlaps with something already in that index. It has no concept of whether an overlap is a properly quoted and cited passage or a copied one — both raise the score identically.
This is why a heavily quoted, meticulously referenced literature review can show a higher percentage than a sloppy paragraph of thinly disguised paraphrase. The number is a starting point for a human to investigate, not a verdict on its own, and markers who have used the tool for years read it that way.
Chasing a specific target percentage by stripping quotation marks or thinning your reference list makes the report look better while making the underlying academic work worse — and that trade almost never helps your actual grade.
Every flagged source in the report links to what it matched against. Work through them one at a time rather than reacting to the headline number: a match against your own reference list entry, a match against a common methodology description used across your whole cohort, and a match against an unattributed source you never cited are three completely different situations.
The first two are usually nothing to worry about. The third is the one worth acting on immediately, and the fix is almost always to either add the missing citation or rewrite the passage in your own words and structure, not just swap a handful of synonyms.
If a chunk of text is flagged and you genuinely wrote it independently, coincidental phrasing overlap does happen, especially for short technical definitions and formulaic methods sections. Note this in your submission if your institution allows a covering comment.
Every order includes the similarity report alongside the finished work, with enough time before your deadline to ask questions or request a revision on anything flagged. We walk you through any match that isn't obviously a citation, so you understand what changed and why.
We do not run your own already-written draft through our systems and hand back a bare score with no context — see our plagiarism removal service if that's what you actually need. This page and the report we issue with a fresh order are about giving you visibility before you submit, not about grading work after the fact.
It measures textual overlap with everything in Turnitin's index — other student papers, journals, websites and books — not plagiarism directly. A properly quoted and cited passage raises the percentage exactly the same as a copied one, which is why the number alone is a poor signal.
There isn't a universal one. Some universities set an informal threshold (commonly discussed figures sit somewhere in the 10-20% range) but plenty of legitimate, well-referenced work sits higher because of quotations and a long reference list, and a low score can still hide one seriously plagiarised paragraph. Your own institution's policy is the only number that matters.
No, and any service that does is not being straight with you. We guarantee the work is written from scratch for your brief and that you get the full report to review before you submit.
We tell you exactly which passage and why, and revise it at no extra cost. Most flags on original work are correctly cited quotations that don't need changing at all — we'll tell you which is which.
It's run through the same similarity-detection approach, but we are an independent academic support service, not your university or Turnitin itself, and we don't control how your institution's own submission portal will score the same text — index coverage can differ.