Turnitin Instructions for Dissertations, Theses, and Doctoral Projects

Students are required to submit their dissertation, thesis, or doctoral project through Turnitin prior to submitting the document to Aquila for the Graduate School review.

The Graduate School hosts a Turnitin class that students should use to submit their document. The Graduate School class is only for dissertations, theses, and doctoral projects. For other papers and assignments, consult your program or instructor for their Turnitin instructions.

Originality reports should first be submitted to your committee chair for review and approval. Once approved, the committee chair should then submit the signed document approval form (link attached) to the Document Specialist. In the event the originality report exceeds 25%, the committee chair will need to provide justification in the provided text box.

Keep in mind:

Turnitin may flag the title page, copyright page, and other preliminary pages as plagiarized due to several students publishing their document using the template.
The Documents Specialist will not penalize students if Turnitin flags the preliminary pages due to template formatting.
The document should only be submitted to Turnitin ONCE to avoid being flagged for plagiarism.
If the document was submitted through a different Turnitin course or other originality software, the account administrator or instructor of that course will need to clear the submission before the document is submitted through the Graduate School’s course. The document may be marked as 100% plagiarized if the submission is submitted multiple times.

Both Class ID and Enrollment Key are required to enroll in the Turnitin course.

The Class ID for Spring 2026 is 50008084.

To request the Class Enrollment Key, contact the Document Specialist at documentspecialistFREEMississippi using your USM email address. The enrollment key will not be send to non-USM email accounts. Requests for Enrollment Keys will be filled during regular business hours, Monday-Friday between 8:00 am and 5:00 pm, excluding University holidays.

Creating a Turnitin Account

If you do not already have a Turnitin account, you will need to create one for the purposes of submitting your dissertation, thesis, or doctoral project. Before creating an account, you will need to contact the Documents Specialist (documentspecialistFREEMississippi) to request the enrollment key.

Navigate to Turnitin.com.
Click the "Create Account" link in the upper-right hand corner.
Select student from the list of account creation options.
Enter the Class ID. (See above for the current Class ID.)
Enter the Enrollment Key. (Contact the Documents Specialist at documentspecialistFREEMississippi for the enrollment key.)
Complete the rest of the account creation fields and create your profile.