- Assignment Submission Dates
- Submitting Papers on Behalf of Students
- File Types and Size
- Text Submission
- Viewing the Turnitin Submission Inbox
- Options Tab
- Leaving Feedback for a Submission
- Opening the Originality Report
Assignment Submission Dates
After completing the assignment settings and clicking on the Save and Display button you will be redirected to the Turnitin assignment page. Clicking on the Turnitin assignment from the course homepage also redirects you to the Turnitin assignment page.
All the assignment dates are contained within the Summary tab for the Turnitin assignment. The due date will default to a week after the date the assignment was created.
To change the assignment dates click on the pencil icon to the right of the dates.
Use the pull-down menus to change the date and times for the Start Date, Due Date, or the Post Date. You may also change the assignment part name and the assignment point value. Once you have finished editing the dates click on the check mark to save your changes.
Start Date -The start date defines the earliest time a student can make a submission to the assignment part.
Due Date -This is the final date by which the student should have submitted their assignment. If you are allowing late submissions, the submissions will be marked as late after this date.
Post Date - This is the date when marks/grades will be released to students. If anonymous marking is turned on (UK only) this is also the date when marks will be released to students.
Turnitin Class Owner - Currently within Turnitin a class is managed by a single instructor. Moodle allows multiple instructors to work on a class and the integration also supports multiple instructors. Only the Turnitin Class Owner will be able to see this assignment within Turnitin. If you are an instructor in Moodle but you are not the Turnitin Class Owner you can change this setting (only instructors can do this) by clicking on the pencil.
This setting has no effect within Moodle itself and only controls who can see the class within Turnitin. You must log-in to Turnitin to see this change. In the majority of cases you will never need to change this setting or login to Turnitin. In a future release of Turnitin multiple Instructors will be supported and this setting will be removed from the integration.
Submitting Papers on Behalf of Students
To submit a paper to the Turnitin assignment, first click on the Turnitin assignment from the course home page. Within the Turnitin assignment click on the Submit Paper tab.
The submission page will require you to select a submission type if Any Submission Type was selected during Turnitin Assignment creation in the general settings. If a specific Submission type was selected then the instructor will have to complete the remaining fields before the submission can be made.
| Submitting a paper to a Turnitin assignment: | |
| 1. Select the student from the Students Name pull down menu who you will be submitting on behalf of |  |
| 2. Enter the submission title |  |
| 3. Select the part of the assignment you are submitting the paper to from the pull down menu. If there is only one part to the Turnitin assignment there will not be a pull down option |  |
| 4. Click on the Browse... button to select the file you would like to submit |  |
| 5. Click on the Add Submission button to submit the file |  |
File Types and Size
Turnitin currently accepts the following file types for upload into an assignment:
- Microsoft Word® (DOC and DOCX)
- Corel WordPerfect®
- HTML
- Adobe PostScript®
- Plain text (TXT)
- Rich Text Format (RTF)
- Portable Document Format (PDF)
The maximum file size is defined in the course settings and selected in the assignment set up screen. Files of larger size may be reduced in size by removal of non-text content. Files that are password protected, encrypted, hidden, system files, or read only files cannot be uploaded or submitted to Turnitin.
Note: Text only files may not exceed 2 MB.
PDF File Note: PDF documents must contain text to be submitted. PDF files containing only images of text will be rejected during the upload attempt. To determine if a document contains actual text, copy and paste a section or all of the text into a plain-text editor such as Microsoft Notepad or Apple TextEdit. If no text is copied over, the selection is not actual text.
PDF Tip: Users submitting scanned images of a document or an image saved as a PDF will need to use Optical Character Recognition (OCR) software to convert the image to a text document. Manual correction of the resulting document is highly recommended to fix any errors caused by the conversion software.
Embedded Links Note: Some document formats can contain multiple data types. This includes text, images, embedded information from another file, and formatting. Non-text information that is not saved directly within the document will not be included in a file upload. This includes references to a Microsoft Excel® spreadsheet included within a Microsoft Office Word document.
File Type Note: Users whose files are saved in a file type that is not accepted by Turnitin will need to use a word processing program to save the file as one of the accepted types. Rich Text Format and Plain Text file types are nearly universally available in word processing software. Neither file type will support images or non-text data within the file. Plain text format does not support any formatting, and rich text format supports only limited formatting options.
Warning: Users who are converting to a new file format will need to save their file with a name different than the original. Any file should be saved with a new file name when converting to plain text or rich text formats to prevent permanent loss of the original formatting or image content of a file.
Text Submission
If Text submission was selected within the general Turnitin assignment settings instructors will submit papers by copying and pasting the text they would like to submit to the assignment into a text box.
| Submitting a text submission to a Turnitin assignment: | |
| 1. Select the student from the Students Name pull down menu that you will be submitting on behalf of | |
| 2. Enter the submission title | |
| 3. Select the part of the assignment you are submitting the paper to from the pull down menu. If there is only one part to the Turnitin assignment there will not be a pull down option | |
| 4. Copy the text you want to submit and paste it within the text box for the Text to Submit option |  |
| 5. Click on the Add Submission button to submit the text to Turnitin | |
Viewing the Turnitin Submission Inbox
Instructors can view the Originality Reports completed for submitted papers by accessing the Turnitin assignment inbox. Either click on the Assignments link in the Activities section on the homepage and click on the assignment title or click on the assignment title on the homepage.
To access the submissions click on the Submissions Inbox tab.
The submission inbox displays a list of the students enrolled in the course and a summary of the originality scores associated with their submissions.
Note: If there are multiple parts for the assignment, you may need to expand the list of submissions by clicking on the [+] symbol next to the student name to see all the student’s details.
The columns headings in the assignment inbox are:
Student Submission - a column containing the names and assignment title for Moodle students in the assignment. Clicking on the name takes you to the Moodle user page for that student. If a student is enrolled in the Turnitin system but not enrolled in the Moodle system the student is listed as “Non Moodle Student”. If the student is subsequently enrolled in Moodle the submission will be linked to the student account automatically. The number of submissions made by a student is included in brackets.
Submitted – this column of the report contains the date and time of the submission. Late submissions are color coded red.
Similarity - this column contains a percentage indicating the overall similarity of the paper to information in the Turnitin repositories, 100% being ‘fully similar’, 0% indicating ‘no similarity’. Clicking on the Similarity % icon opens the Originality Report.
Grade column – this column either contains a grade and a pencil icon for editing the grade or if GradeMark has been enabled the column indicates if GradeMark is available. A red apple icon shows what papers can be accessed in GradeMark. A gray apple icon indicates that a submission is not available in GradeMark. No icon will appear if a student has not submitted a paper to the assignment or if GradeMark has not been purchased for the account. If the icon is available, click on the red apple icon to open a GradeMark window.
Download icon - a arrow icon located to the right of the submission. Click on the icon to download a copy of the submission.
Delete icon - a trash bin icon located to the right of the submission. Click on the icon to delete the submission from the inbox.
Refresh Submissions - this option checks with Turnitin to see if more submissions have been entered or if new Originality Reports are available.
Enroll All Students - this options only affects users that also access Turnitin through the native Turnitin web site. Clicking on this button enrolls all students from this Moodle class in Turnitin in one go. You do not normally need to select this option, as students are enrolled in Turnitin as required for the purposes of submission.
Options Tab
The Options tab allows you to select various options for the Turnitin assignment.
Date Format: this option allows you to select US style date or UK style date formatting. In a future release this will be derived from the locale.
Auto Submit: by default as soon as a student uploads work it is sent to Turnitin for processing. You can switch this off and separate the loading of work into Moodle from the upload to Turnitin. If you separate this process the students would need to submit a draft and then separately click a button to upload the draft into Turnitin.
Use GradeMark: if your institution is subscribed to GradeMark you can use this setting to revert back to manually grading instead of using the Turnitin grading system.
Grade Display: this setting allows to select either a % score for grades (the default) or a fraction (xx/100) for the display of grades.
Auto Refresh Grades / Scores: by default the system will automatically attempt to refresh originality scores and grades, but this can be turned off if the instructor would rather do it manually.
Submission List: by default all students are listed whether they have submitted to an assignment or not. However, if you prefer, you can opt to only see students in this list that have submitted work.
Comments Remain Editable, Maximum comment length: an instructor can provide feedback to a student on the submission through a comments area. These settings determine how long comments remain editable and how many characters can be used.
Leaving Feedback for a Submission
To leave feedback for a student’s submission click on the blue number link within the Feedback column.
A text box will be available for the instructor to enter their feedback on the student’s submission. Click on the Add/Edit Comment button to add the comment.
Opening the Originality Report
The Turnitin Originality Report can be accessed from the submission inbox. Under the Similarity column are the icons indicating the percentage of the similarity score and the corresponding color on a blue(0%) to red scale(100%).
Click on the icon to open the Originality Report. For more in depth information on Originality Reports please click here to view the Originality Report chapter of the Turnitin Instructor manual.