For Staff - Turnitin (Quick Start)
Contents
What is Turnitin?
Turnitin checks text-based assignments for information copied from websites, electronic journals and the work of other students. Staff can create a Turnitin submission area in VLE modules/organisations.
Adding an assignment - Demo (3 mins 06 secs)
Note
Because Turnitin is primarily designed to check for plagiarism, it can only accept certain file types: MS Word (.doc), WordPerfect (.wpd), PostScript (.eps), Portable Document Format (.pdf), HTML (.htm), Rich Text (.rtf) and Plain Text (.txt). There are file size limits: 20MB and 2MB for text only files. If submissions are unlikely to fulfil this criteria, use the Blackboard assignment tool.
Quick Guide to creating a Turnitin assignment area:
Add an assignment area
Navigate to where you want students to view and submit the assignment. Make sure Edit Mode is ON (top right of the screen). Then click on Add Asssessment and select TurnitinUK Assignment:
Select Paper Assignment which is the default option.
Enter essential information
Now you'll see the new assignment page:
Working from the top of the New Assignment page:
- Enter an assignment title and a point value i.e. number of marks for the assignment.
- Set the start date for when the students will see the assignment, the due date and the post date for when the students will see grades/GradeMark papers and, if anonymous marking is enabled, the author names are made available.
- Whether to let students view originality reports
- When originality reports should be generated
- Whether to allow submissions after the due date
- Whether to enable anonymous marking (make sure you read the full guide for more information on how this works)
- the details of the person making the request
- details of the match found (e.g. 20%)
- the module the paper in question was submitted to
- the text of the paper in question
Warning
Choose the post date carefully if using anonymous marking - you should not change it once it has passed so you must choose a date which is after the marking deadline.
More options
There are further options, most of which can be left as default. However, we do recommend that you consider setting Reveal grades to students only on post date? to Yes. If you leave this setting as the default and have the tool My Grades on the module menu, students will see their Turnitin grade there as soon as it has been entered, regardless of the post date. Read the full guide for more information.
To view more options, click the More Options button at the bottom of the new assignment page.
Read the full Turnitin guide for information on these settings, these include:
Click submit
Once you set all the options, select submit. A confirmation will appear: 'TurnitinUK Assignment successfully added'.
Submit
Students would normally submit their own assignments.
Help your students
Why not make life easier for your students by linking to the guide on assignment submission with Turnitin, there is also a video demo available.
View submissions
To view assignments and originality reports, go to the Control Panel and click on Module Tools and then TurnitinUK Assignment:
Then click on the relevant assignment. A table will open and from this you can view an online version of papers or download files (unless anonymous marking is enabled):
Note
Don't worry if students are missing from this list, as long as they are enrolled on the module, they should be able to submit. If you prefer you can click Roster Sync (above the table on the right) which should add them to the list.
View paper requests
If you use Turnitin you may occasionally receive requests from staff at other Universities to view a student’s paper to check for plagiarism. The request will come via email and will come from jisc_help@turnitin.com. The text of the email will include:
To allow the person to view the paper,
