Submit Turnitin Assignment guide

It can take time for your file to be uploaded to Moodle and for it to be processed by Turnitin. This can be anywhere from a couple of minutes to up to 30 minutes per file, depending on the size and format of your file and your connection speed. Ensure you leave yourself adequate time to successfully submit your assignment, especially if you are submitting multiple large files.

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.

It is important to note that Turnitin does not tell academics if a student has plagiarised. Students often ask, what percentage of matched text is acceptable? There is no answer for this. For example an annotated bibliography assignment might have a high instance of matched text, because of the use of quotations and use of common phrases. Identifying plagiarism in a student assignment relies on academic judgement.

Review this guide for the steps involved in submitting coursework to Turnitin.

Make sure you are using a supported browser and have configured your settings to work with Turnitin. Check out Turnitin's system requirements. 

Give yourself enough time to submit your assignment online. You must submit all parts of your assignment prior to the assignment deadline. We recommended putting aside at least 30 minutes to submit your assignment. 

• Microsoft Word™ (DOC and DOCX)
• Corel WordPerfect®
• HTML
• Adobe PostScript®
• Plain text (TXT)
• Rich Text Format (RTF)
• Portable Document Format (PDF) Only PDF documents created in Adobe Acrobat® or PDF files created in word and saved with a new file name will be accepted. Turnitin will not accept PDF image files, forms, or portfolios, files that do not contain highlightable text (e.g. a scanned file - usually an image), documents containing multiple files or files created with software other than Adobe Acrobat®. 
• Microsoft PowerPoint (PPTX) Turnitin converts the PowerPoint slide deck into a static PDF, leaving all text and images in their original format but leaving out features such as presenter notes, embedded video, and animations. Text with visual effects is not supported, and it is recommended that any visual effects such as shadows and 3D be removed prior to submitting to Turnitin. Please note that other file formats available in PowerPoint will not be accepted by Turnitin.
• Hangul (HWP)
• Microsoft Excel® (.xls and .xlsx). The version of the file that can be viewed in Turnitin will look the same as it would if the Excel file had been saved as a PDF and submitted to Turnitin. We highly recommend that students pay attention to the image preview provided in the single file submission to verify that the file is presented in an acceptable manner.  Users can adjust the way the file looks by editing the page setup and print area settings for the file prior to saving it and submitting it to Turnitin.  If you have a .xls/.xlsx or .csv file that is 450 pages or more, save the file as a PDF for submission to Turnitin.
• Other file types, such as Apple Pages, may be accepted by Turnitin's Feedback Studio but they will not generate a Similarity Report.

• Zip files.
• ODP files
• Files not listed on Turnitin's accepted file types.

• Punctuation in file names can generate errors when submitted to Turnitin. When naming your Turnitin assignment files, avoid using any punctuation except underscore '_'.
• File names must be under 40 characters including spaces.
• Remove headers & footers as these might cause an issue with the generation of a Turnitin Similarity Report.
• File must not contain spaces in between every letter (l i k e  t h i s).
• Text only files may not exceed 2 MB.
• A file must contain more than 25 words to be uploaded.
• PDF documents must contain text to be submitted.
• 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.
• Turnitin submissions have a maximum size of 100MB though a lower limit may have been set.

Tip: When converting a file to a new file format, users should rename their file with a name other than that of the original file. This is suggested to prevent permanent loss of the original formatting or image content of a file due to it being overwritten.

When you submit a file to a Moodle assignment with Turnitin enabled, you may receive an error message that prevents your 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:

• problem creating the module in Turnitin (see API logs) 
• problem editing the module settings in Turnitin (see API logs) 
• no accessible content in the file pool 
• XML response could not be parsed 

To rectify these errors, please try the following:

1. If the file name of your submission is over 40 characters, change the file name of your submission and resubmit the file.
2. If  you converted the assignment file from Word to PDF, we have found changing the file name and resubmitting the assignment works.
3. If the file name has any punctuation apart from underscores, remove punctuation from the file name and resubmit.
4. If the file name & file name convention is OK, sometimes, simply changing the file name helps push the paper through to Turnitin. 

Note: If you don't seem to have the ability to resubmit or if the deadline has passed, please contact your Course Officer who can assist.

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.