Help and support
Further advice and training opportunities
Resources
Looking for a Quick Guide to the changes when we moved to Turnitin LTI? You can find these on the Turnitin in Learn pages
For staff
General advice
Turnitin: moving to LTI (captioned video; 40 mins) [link to Media Hopper]
Make sure that students know in what format their submission should be, and make sure that this is in agreement with Turnitin's advice on File requirements [external link].
Please take great care not to delete an inbox which contains submissions.
It is not possible for Turnitin to restore a Turnitin assignment LTI 1.3 link once the assignment link has been deleted from Learn. Turnitin may be able to help you retrieve all submissions made to a deleted assignment by transferring them to a new assignment created in the same course.
It is crucial to note that if a rubric was linked to the deleted assignment link and used to grade the submissions, the same rubric needs to be attached to the new assignment by the rubric owner. If not, the rubric grading information will be lost.
Note that with LTI 1.3 integration, although Turnitin can transfer the assignment papers to a new assignment, any grades applied will not transfer to Learn's Grade Centre. This is because it is not technically possible. Grades will need to be manually entered in Grade Centre.
Uploading a zip file of submissions is not possible in the LTI and you can only submit on behalf of a student on the course.
Submissions that show an exclamation mark (in the assignment inbox)
If Turnitin processes a paper and flags the submission within the assignment inbox with a black exclamation icon next to the submission title, it indicates there is either a submission processing error or provides more information about the content of the submission to be raised to your attention.
Click on the exclamation mark and a message with an explanation of the issue will be displayed.
Reasons for the black exclamation mark icon appearing include:
- The document viewer has failed to generate an image to view for the submission. This is normally due to certain types of images contained in the file or the number of images that Turnitin needs to process. Please click on the exclamation mark and this will resubmit the paper for you automatically, and the Similarity Report will attempt to (re)generate.
- The Similarity Report for submissions with over 30% text as quoted material will show the exclamation mark.
- The Similarity Report for submissions with over 15% text as bibliographic material will show the exclamation mark.
- The paper has unusual word usage patterns and should be reviewed in text-only mode.
For reasons 2 and 3 above, if the 'exclude quoted and bibliographic material' is enabled, all matching text to quoted or bibliographic material will be excluded from the Similarity Report. The exclamation mark icon informs instructors of this situation so that they know that a high portion of the text is quoted or bibliographic material and that it is being excluded from the similarity check.
A high proportion of content being excluded as bibliographic material can indicate that the bibliography key exclusion words may have been added only once to the paper and possibly within a content table, meaning any content beyond that is not being checked by the Turnitin service for similarity.
It is important to ensure that the bibliography exclusion keyword used in the content table is also used as a header for the bibliography section of the paper as Turnitin looks to exclude content being checked for similarity from the last instance of the exclusion keyword occurring.
For students
Follow the instructions given to you by your Course Organiser and, if in doubt, contact your Course Office.
There is a limit to the size of document you can upload to Turnitin. Documents with many high resolution images can often present a problem. You can reduce the size of your document following this guidance:
Reducing the size of your Word documents | Microsoft Support
Follow the instructions given to you by your Course Organiser. If you are asked to submit a PDF, make sure it has been created using MS Office or Adobe Acrobat only (other PDFs cannot be read).
Follow the instructions given to you by your Course Organiser. If you are asked to submit a PDF, make sure it has been created using MS Office or Adobe Acrobat only (other PDFs cannot be read).
Submitting a paper – for Moodle (external website)
If a Similarity Check has been made, you will always be able to see your Similarity Score in the inbox. However, it is at your Course Organiser's discretion if you can see your Similarity Report.
Accessing the text-only version of the Similarity Report (external website)
Guides from Turnitin
Online guides for using Turnitin, for both staff and students, are available from the Turnitin website:
Turnitin guides (external link)
Training courses
Staff
We provide scheduled training for staff in the use of Turnitin.
We are also able to provide bespoke training for groups of staff. Contact us through IS Helpline (below) for details.
Students
We advise students to make use of the guidance, including workshops and one-to-one consultations, offered by the Institute of Academic Development (IAD) on academic writing and referencing:
Known issues
If you are experiencing issues with Turnitin, you may find it useful to consult our list of currently identified issues:
Updates and known issues (internal link)
Further help
If you have any issues using Turnitin, or want to discuss how to use it, contact the IS Helpline with as much detail possible (e.g. browser, platform, course):