My FYP Turnitin Similarity Score Is Too High — Here's How to Actually Fix It

You submit your draft, get the Turnitin report back, and the similarity score is way higher than you expected. Panic sets in, because "plagiarism" is one of the scariest words in academia — but a high similarity score and actual plagiarism are not the same thing, and most students in this situation haven't copied anything on purpose.

Understanding What the Score Actually Measures First

Turnitin's similarity score is a text-matching percentage, not an originality or honesty judgment. It flags any text that matches something else in its database — including your own reference list, direct quotes you've properly cited, common technical phrases every FYP in your field uses, and boilerplate sections like your university's standard declaration page. None of that is plagiarism, but it all still counts toward the percentage.

There's no single universal number that counts as "safe" — different universities and even different supervisors set their own thresholds, and it often depends on the discipline and how much direct quotation is expected. Check your specific faculty's guidelines or ask your supervisor directly what threshold they're working with, rather than assuming a number from somewhere else applies to you.

The Real Causes, Ranked by How Often They Actually Happen

Your reference list and in-text citations. These get flagged constantly, especially if you're using a common citation format that appears identically across thousands of other papers. This is completely normal and expected — but it's worth checking your report's match breakdown to confirm these matches are indeed your bibliography section and not something else.

Technical/method descriptions that are hard to phrase differently. If your project uses an ESP32 and a DHT22 sensor, there are only so many ways to describe "the DHT22 reads temperature and humidity over a single-wire digital interface" without changing the actual technical meaning. Turnitin will flag this kind of overlap even when you wrote it independently, because the underlying technical facts are described similarly across many sources.

Direct quotes that are properly cited but still match. Quoting a definition or a specific claim from a source, with quotation marks and a citation, is legitimate academic practice — but it still shows up as a match. A high percentage from properly attributed quotes is a different problem from unattributed copying, and your supervisor can usually tell the difference by checking the report's source breakdown.

Paraphrasing that stayed too close to the original sentence structure. This is the one actually worth fixing carefully. If you took a source's sentence and just swapped a few synonyms while keeping the same structure and order of ideas, Turnitin (and a human reader) can still recognize it as functionally the same sentence — this is the version of "close paraphrasing" that genuinely does raise integrity concerns if left unaddressed.

A shared university template or standard section headers. Declaration pages, standard chapter headers, and formatting boilerplate required by your faculty will match every other student's report using the same template — this inflates the raw percentage but isn't something you can or should try to change.

How to Actually Bring the Number Down

1. Open the detailed match report, not just the summary percentage. Look at where each match is coming from. If most of your matches are your bibliography and your own previously submitted proposal (which Turnitin sometimes flags against itself), the fix is different from if there's genuine close paraphrasing.

2. Rewrite close paraphrases from scratch, not by editing. Read the original source, close it, then write the idea in your own words from memory without looking back and forth between the two. This produces genuinely different sentence structure rather than a synonym-swapped version of the original.

3. Increase direct quotation where appropriate, but don't overdo it. For places where the original wording is genuinely the clearest way to state something (a formal definition, a precise technical spec), quote it properly with citation rather than paraphrasing badly — a clearly marked quote is more honest than a disguised paraphrase.

4. Exclude your bibliography and quoted material from the similarity calculation if your Turnitin setup allows it — many university Turnitin configurations let you exclude the reference list and quoted text from the percentage, which removes a large chunk of legitimate but score-inflating matches. Check with your FYP coordinator whether this exclusion is available and standard practice at your institution.

5. Talk to your supervisor before resubmitting, especially if the score seems high for reasons you can't fully explain. A supervisor who reviews the actual match report (not just the number) can usually tell you quickly whether you have a real problem or a technical artifact of how Turnitin counts matches.

What Not to Do

Don't try to trick the similarity checker with character substitution, invisible text, or translation-and-back-translation tricks to artificially lower the score. These techniques are well known to markers and Turnitin itself has detection for some of them — getting caught attempting this is a far bigger problem than a high but honestly-explainable percentage.

If You're Still Unsure Whether It's a Real Problem

Bring the detailed match report to your supervisor and ask them to walk through the top five highest-matching sections with you. In our experience working alongside students on FYP documentation, most similarity concerns turn out to be citation and template matches rather than genuine integrity issues — but it's always worth confirming rather than assuming, since the cost of a genuine unaddressed issue is much higher than the ten minutes it takes to check.

Need Help Reviewing Your Report Before Submission?

Rectronx Circuits has supported 400+ students through the documentation stage of their FYP, including helping structure reports that hold up cleanly under similarity checks. WhatsApp us for a free consultation.

Related reading: our guide on what Malaysian FYP examiners actually look for during viva covers how documentation quality gets evaluated beyond just the similarity score.

Looking for more inspiration? Browse 500+ FYP project titles by category and get a free quote.