How Do I Get Students to Submit?

When the decision was made to implement a scheme to reduce plagiarism at Lancaster, the University opted for staff submission of work that students had previously handed in electronically. Originally, it was thought of a choice simply between staff putting all the work in as a batch, which is relatively simple, or having students hand the work in themselves one by one, with all the support implications of hundreds of students possibly having separate problems.

However, since that decision was made, some lecturers, most notably in the Management School have asked for mechanisms to let students submit essays into Turnitin, with the settings on the assignments adjusted so that those students can submit over and over again until their essays do not show matches with the internet and other on-line materials. Recently (December 2009) students have been asking staff for access to the product for this reason. The student documentation in this website tells them to contact their course tutor about it, but does say that this is not a decision that will be taken lightly by the member of staff or their department.

There are some sound pedagogical reasons why a department might want to let students check their own essays, and then hand them in. At first glance, it might just seem like a way to enable students who cheat to refine their methods and avoid getting caught, and without proper support of those studying it could turn into that, but done in conjunction with instructions on writing good essays, it can encourage an academic culture where students learn what is right to do rather than learn to fear getting it wrong. 

In order to set up student submission for this purpose, first of all, you must have already have a Turnitin account and added a class. How to get this far is shown in sections 1 to 4 of this documentation.

When you create a class, the system returns a window like the one above. This contains the 'Class ID' and the 'enrollment password' for students on that course. All you have to do is note them down, and then give them to students attending that class. The students will then be able to enroll themselves on the system (see here to see how they do it: http://www.lancs.ac.uk/celt/celtweb/anti_plag_student_enrolling) , and upload files to the assignments that you set within it.

Note that when you set up assignments, you need to set up the assignments in the right way to let the students submit over and over again. This is explained fully in appendix 1 of  section 3 of these instructions,linked to here:

http://www.lancs.ac.uk/celt/celtweb/anti_plagiarism_login

The student instructions for student submissions are on this site at this address:

http://www.lancs.ac.uk/celt/celtweb/essay_assist_students

With this done, you should be able to see your students’ work as they add documents, and they should be able to log into the system and submit with their own username and password.

Click here to return to section 4 of the documentation - submitting single files.