Does a high similarity score always indicate plagiarism? Does a low similarity score indicate that there was not any plagiarism?
A very high number can indicate academic integrity issues. However, even essays generating a low similarity score may still have problematic material. For example, an essay with a similarity score of 20% could include a long, uncited passage from another source, which would generally constitute plagiarism; the same score could also indicate that the student had used similar phrases and sentence mechanics as other authors, in a way that did not indicate any academic integrity issues. Faculty using Turnitin are strongly encouraged to review Similarity Reports in detail, rather than relying only on the numeric score assigned.