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Create Turnitin Assignment guide

Turnitin is an online assessment management system that you can use to support student submission, provision of grades and feedback. It also includes a similarity check. This guide provides an overview of how to set up Turnitin assignments.

Turnitin Formative Assignments

Formative assignments which allow students to view their similarity reports can help students develop their academic writing and improve their referencing and citation skills, and can lead to lower rates of plagiarism in subsequent assessments. (Halgamuge, 2017). If you are planning on allowing students to view their similarity reports, get in touch with the Digital Education Team and we can share guidance to help students to interpret their similarity reports.

The Library also provides guidance, training and tools to help students with referencing and citing. Contact your subject librarian for more details.

Create Turnitin assignment

  1. Turn Edit mode on.
  2. Open the topic/week where you want the Turnitin assignment to be located.
  3. Select Add an activity or resource.
  4. Select Turnitin Assignment from the Activities tab.

Add title and summary

  1. Turnitin Assignment name: Give your assignment a name. Choose something meaningful for students and help them to distinguish between different assignments on the module.
  2. Summary: Provide assignment information and instructions.We recommend including a link to our Submit Turnitin Assignment guide for students in this field. If you are using Feedback Studio to grade, instruct students to submit their assignments with double-spaced text. Select the tick box under the summary to display this information on the module page.

Set submission type

  1. For most assignments, you will not need to change the default values.
  2. Change Number of Parts for multipart assignments. See Settings for each Assignment Part for details on how to set the weightings for multipart assignments.
  3. Change Allow submission of any file type? to Yes if students are required to submit files up to 100MB. Please note that not all file types will generate a Similarity Report and Turnitin only accepts limited file types. Review Accepted file types guidance.
  4. To allow students to view their Similarity Report, change the Display Originality Reports to Students to Yes.
  5. Anonymous Marking: Default is No. Please refer to the section of this guide Create Turnitin Anonymous Assignment if you want to set up an Anonymous Turnitin assignment.
  6. If the defaults don't meet your requirements for Turnitin assignments, change the defaults for your first Turnitin assignment and then check the box alongside Set these values as assignment defaults. The system will remember your defaults and apply them each time you set up a Turnitin assignment.

Set Grade

  1. In the Grade settings, set the Maximum points for the Turnitin assignment.
  2. Set the Grade to pass if required: This setting determines the minimum grade required to pass. This may not be required for a formative assignment.
  3. See the guide on Grader Report for help on how to set up a category for formative assignments.

Settings for each Assignment Part

  1. Set your Start, Due and Post Date. Note: For multipart assignments, set dates for each assignment part.
  2. Start Date is when the Summary text area becomes visible to students.
  3. Due Date is when the students are expected to submit their assignment. We recommend setting this between 9-5 Monday to Friday so IT, educational technology and course office support is available.
  4. Post Date is when the feedback and marks are released to the student.
  5. For multipart assignments, you might need to change the Max Marks on each Assignment Part. For example, many assignments are set up as multipart assignments to enable students to submit supporting evidence, but only Part 1 of the assignment is graded. In this example, you would set Assignment Part 1 to 100 and all other Assignment Parts to 0.

Similarity Report Settings

  1. Allow Submissions after the Due Date: We recommend changing this setting to Yes. Submissions attempted after the due date are often not received by Turnitin and cannot be marked using Feedback Studio.
  2. Report Generation Speed: This setting controls how quickly and how often similarity reports are generated.
    • Generate reports immediately (students can resubmit until the due date, After 3 submissions from one student, reports for those submissions generate after 24 hours). Similarity Reports for the initial submission by each student are generated immediately. Students may resubmit as often as they wish until the due date. Only the latest submission is available to the lecturer or student. Previous versions are removed. Student submissions will be compared against their peers submissions within the assignment on the due date, which may result in a change in the similarity index on the due date.
    • Generate reports on due date (students can resubmit until due date): Similarity Reports will not be generated for any submission until the due date and time of the assignment. Students may resubmit as many times as needed until the due date and time without receiving reports. Resubmissions may not be made after the due date and time of the assignment.
    • Generate reports immediately (students cannot resubmit) - Similarity Reports for all submissions will be generated immediately. Students cannot resubmit papers. Submissions must be deleted by the lecturer/course officer to enable resubmission. This option is not recommended as students are unable to resubmit and submissions are not checked against each other.
  3. Store Student Papers:  You must use the option No Repository so the student's formative submission is not matched to a later summative submission. If you accidentally set use the option of Standard Repository,  log a request on IT Self Service Portal to remove the assignment from Turnitin. Please quote the Turnitin ID number in your request.
  4. The remainder of the options enable you to exclude certain searches from a Similarity Report and we do not recommend that any of these options are changed. These similarity report should be filtered in the Feedback Studio during the marking process instead.    

GradeMark Options

  • If you have previously created a rubric this will be available in the rubric drop-down menu.
  • If you would like to create a rubric select Launch Rubric Manager and follow the Create Turnitin Rubric guidance.

Common Module Settings

If you have multiple lecturers grading assignments, set up groups/groupings to manage the marking.

  1. Add students to groups.
  2. Set Group mode to Separate groups.
  3. When you view the assignment, filter by separate groups to facilitate the marking process.

Save and display

  • Select Save and display to review your Due and Post Dates.

References

Halgamuge, M.N. 2017, "The use and analysis of antiā€plagiarism software: Turnitin tool for formative assessment and feedback", Computer applications in engineering education, vol. 25, no. 6, pp. 895-909.

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