Empowering Students Before They Submit: An Instructor's Guide to Turnitin Draft Coach

For students, the moment of submitting an essay into the LMS drop box is often filled with anxiety. Did they paraphrase correctly? Did they miss a citation? For years, Turnitin operated as a final checkpoint—a place where papers were evaluated only after the work was done. Enter Turnitin Draft Coach, a tool that flips this dynamic by moving the checks directly into the student's writing process.

What is Turnitin Draft Coach?

Unlike standard Turnitin assignments configured in Canvas, Blackboard, or Moodle, Draft Coach is an add-on that lives directly inside the spaces where students actually write: Google Docs and Microsoft Word on the web. It serves as a real-time academic integrity assistant.

• Similarity Checks (Limited): Students can run up to three Similarity Checks per document. This limitation is brilliant—it forces students to actually revise their work between checks rather than just changing words one-by-one until the score drops.
• Citations Checks: The tool scans the document for references and in-text citations, alerting students if they have cited a source in their text but forgot to include it in their bibliography (or vice versa).

Why Instructors Should Champion Draft Coach

As an instructor, encouraging your students to use Draft Coach isn't just about helping them; it's a massive time-saver for you.

1. Eliminates Accidental Plagiarism: The vast majority of plagiarism in lower-level courses is accidental—students simply don't know how to paraphrase yet. Draft Coach catches these errors before you ever have to grade them.
2. Reduces the "Gotcha" Conversations: Because students have the opportunity to check their own work, when a final paper does flag for high similarity in your instructor dashboard, you know the student bypassed the tools provided to them, making the integrity conversation much more straightforward.
3. Builds Student Accountability: It shifts the responsibility of academic integrity from the instructor policing the final draft back to the student managing their own writing process.

How to Enable It

Access to Draft Coach depends on your institution's Turnitin license. Usually, if your school has Turnitin Originality or Turnitin Feedback Studio, your IT administrator can enable the Google Workspace or Microsoft 365 add-on globally. Once enabled, students simply click "Add-ons" in their document and select Turnitin Draft Coach.

Conclusion

The best way to handle academic misconduct is to prevent it from happening in the first place. By moving Turnitin's powerful similarity and citation algorithms into the drafting phase with Draft Coach, instructors can foster a culture of proactive learning and self-correction.