Turnitin is an assessment management system that includes a web-based text-matching software system. Students can submit their coursework to Turnitin and lecturers can use Turnitin's Feedback Studio to grade and provide feedback on the assignments. A Similarity Report is produced by comparing the text of a student's submission against text from a wide range of electronic material including journals, websites, and other students’ work, including work from many UK universities.
Turnitin provides a report on text matches. Turnitin does not interpret the report nor dictate action in response to the report, nor does access to the software, in itself, imply any requirement to act on the report. Those questions remain properly the responsibility of the University's academic processes.
Turnitin can also be used formatively to help students learn about the importance of good academic practices and good referencing.
Contact the IT Self Service Portal to request training from the Digital Education team if you have not used Turnitin before.
Students should never be asked to include personally identifiable information about third parties in assessments that are uploaded to Turnitin. Third parties have not agreed for Turnitin to process their information.
A Turnitin assignment has a number of benefits.
To see how Turnitin assignments compare to the other most commonly used assignment tools in Moodle use the Assignment activity selector to see details of each assignment type.
It's not possible to create a group assignment on Turnitin.
It is possible to enable Turnitin on a Moodle group assignment but Turnitin should only be used to view the similarity report. Turnitin does not support group marking. You must use Moodle's grading mechanisms to provide grades and feedback.
See our guidance on Moodle group assignments for more information.
A matter for both Schools and for the University as a whole concerns what type of papers to submit to Turnitin. A preferable policy is to either submit all papers to Turnitin, to submit all papers for a given module/paper, or to submit a random sampling of papers (for example, 10%). It should also be made clear to students which policy is at work, and be made clear how they can access support resources both before and after any course work is due.
All Turnitin services may be unavailable for use during scheduled maintenance times. Times for these scheduled maintenance windows are the first and third Saturdays of each month. Avoid scheduling assignment deadlines outside of core working hours. Avoid scheduling any marking on the first and third Saturdays of each month. Check the Moodle dashboard for information about upcoming Turnitin maintenance.
Punctuation in file names can generate errors when submitted to Turnitin. When students name their Turnitin assignment files, they should avoid using any punctuation except underscore.
When a student submits a file to a Moodle assignment with Turnitin enabled, they may receive an error message that prevents their submission from uploading successfully to Turnitin.
Some of the errors such as file exceeds maximum allowed size and user has not accepted end user agreement are clear to understand and easily rectifiable by following the guidelines set in the Submit Turnitin Assignment Guide.
There are other errors that are not so clear to understand such as:
To rectify these errors, please try the following:
Note: If students were required to click the submit button you will need to revert their submission to a draft. If the cut-off date in the past you will need to give students an extension to a future time to enable them to resubmit.
Alternatively, a staff member with the programme admin role can log in as the student to resubmit on their behalf:
On submission of a Turnitin assignment, students will receive a notification to their City email stating that the file has been submitted. The full digital receipt can be viewed and printed from the Turnitin My Submissions screen. If you find you are also getting these receipts as a staff member refer to the Switch off email for Turnitin assignments guidance.
