An automated email goes to the lecturer(s), administrators and teaching assistants associated with the Turnitin assignment where the original submission was made. The institution will make a decision on whether to release the paper or not.
If you are enrolled on a Final Year Project module in the Business School, and receive a request to release a paper, this request will also be received by AQS.
AQS will make a decision on whether to release the assignment – submissions marked as confidential will not be released. Non-confidential submissions will have personal information removed prior to releasing the submission to the requesting university.
A number of staff have reported problems in opening Turnitin Submission Inboxes using Internet Explorer or Chrome on Windows. We recommend that you do not use Internet Explorer to access Turnitin. Please note that Turnitin has ended support for Internet Explorer 9.
If the Submission Inbox hangs with the message Loading data from Turnitin, try refreshing your browser. If this does not work try using Firefox while Information Services investigate this issue.
If you are a Mac user, please ensure that you using OS X 10.4.11 (Tiger) or above.
A class within Turnitin is equivalent to a Moodle module and has a natural shelf life of 5 years. So if you set up a new module today, it will be 'active' until 2028. Within that 5 year period, when the class is initially set up, Turnitin automatically allocates a class end date for 12 months' time. If you set up a class today, it can last a total of 5 years, but the class will have an end date after 12 months. When you add a new assignment to that class, the end date will automatically extend 12 months into the future until the natural shelf-life date is reached. Once this date is reached, no further assignments can be added. If you try to access a paper submitted to an expired assignment you will see the message, "This paper was submitted to a class that is expired, and is currently in read-only mode."
In February 2023 Turnitin extended the class end date to a period of 12 months. This applies to modules created in or after February 2023, those created before will still have a 6 month long expiration period.
If you add a Module end date via the Module settings in Moodle, Turnitin will automatically set an expiry date of one month after that end date on the class.
If you need to complete marking and the assignment has become read only, log an incident on IT Self Service Portal and the Digital Education Team can extend your class as long as the assignment is less than 5 years old.
Ensure you wait until the due date has passed before you start marking. Many assignments are set up to enable students to resubmit until the due date. If a student updates their assignment submission prior to the deadline and you have provided feedback on the original submission, your feedback will be overwritten.
From 2nd November 2022, requests to view papers submitted to Turnitin assignments at City will be received by an email address managed by the Digital Education team. The Digital Education team will only contact module leaders with external paper view requests where the similarity match is 25% or over.
The Module Leader can reply to the email from the Digital Education team with their decision. They can decide to release the paper, release the paper with redactions, decline to release the paper or ask follow up questions of the requestor prior to making a decision on whether to release the paper.
If you decide to release a paper, you will first need to redact confidential information. Review the paper for instances of the student’s name or other confidential information in the text of the assignment. Remove the text and replace with the following information: "Student name removed - General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR)" or "Confidential Information removed - General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR)"
You may decide to decline a request due to an insignificant match. You can also decline internal and external requests if the paper contains sensitive, personal or commercially sensitive information.
You may notice a different word count in Turnitin when a file is submitted as a Word document and when the same file is submitted as a PDF. This is because both word counts come from different sources. Indeed, when a Word file is submitted, the word count Turnitin use comes from MS Word. On the other hand, when a PDF is submitted, the word count comes from Turnitin’s analysis code based on the text extracted from the PDF.
Since these are two different sources, it is possible that the word count in Turnitin is different. Generally, the word count from Word is accurate for languages that use Latin alphabet characters like English.
Note: When calculating the word count from an MS Word document, Turnitin do not include footnotes or end notes towards the word count.
This may happen if you have different maximum grades for the overall assignment and in total for the Assignment parts. Check that the maximum grade in both the Grade settings and for all assignment parts match. If there is a discrepancy between them, the grades may not display as expected. Please note that after you update the maximun grades for the assignment parts, you will have to refresh all the grades from Turnitin to make the Grader report refresh with the correct marks.
