Submitting a single file for examination & Turnitin navigation
We've put in this part about submitting single files because the best way of showing you how Turnitin works, and for you to have a trial go yourself is to start with individual files. You might also like to have students submit single files to check their own work, which is covered in section 12 of the guide, and so you need to know how to do it yourself. When you are checking student assignments or dissertations for real, however, it is important to use the batch submission method to upload all the work from any assignment. More details about the importance of submitting all student work from any assignment if you submit any at all are given in the section of this guide about analysing results, and the batch submission mechanism itself is covered in section 10 of this guide. However, if you're starting with Turnitin, please read on...
You'll need to be inside a class home page as reached in the section 3. 'Login and setup' and as shown below. In this case there's only one assignment, but obviously a class would usually have a list of assignments. From here, you can click on the inbox folder icon for each assignment to look at the list of things already uploaded to the assignment.
Below, you can see what an assignment looks like with nothing in it. From there, you can click on "submit paper" to continue:
After clicking the submit paper link, the file upload window appears. The dropdown at the top defines the type of upload done, and this where you can set Turnitin to accept batches of files, but for single file uploads, just leave the default. The next drop down will only have one option, so has to be left as 'non-enrolled student'. The name and title fields have to be filled in, and then you use the browse button to locate the file that you'd like checked on your local hard drive, and upload it by clicking submit. The file types that Turnitin are listed on this page, as you can see. Also there is the file size limit - it's now 20MB1. If you have problems uploading the file for any reason, click here .Please also note that students should submit essay, references and appendices in one file3 to reduce confusion.
BTW. If you'd set the assignment not to add the paper to the student repository - then it will tell you here at the top of the yellow section. However, as you can see, if you really don't want to have the paper added to the repository, it doesn't warn you that this is what it will do here - it's just the default.
Turnitin then puts up a checking window to let you see what's about to be added, so you can check that you've actually uploaded the correct file. It also warns you about uploading stuff independently for enrolled students, but the advice isn't related to stuff we do normally at Lancaster2, so just click on the submit button to procede.
Following is the receipt for paper uploads that appears next.
From there you can go back to the assignment inbox.
The assignment inbox lists all of the reports that have been submitted to it - in this case, only one, and it also lists the percentage of matching with the internet or journals that it has found. In the previous section, you should have selected the option to exclude parts of the work that have been properly put in quotes or the bibliography, so as those have been excluded, this percentage represents the percentage matching of the student work with either Turnitin's scans of the internet, their stock of student scripts, or publications to which Turnitin has access.
Note that the percentage matching items in Turnitin's databases is not the same as percentage that's been copied.The student may have a good reason why they've put some unoriginal material in their essay. Or they may be rubbish at writing essays. Interpreting what they've done is covered in section 5.
The percentage indicator is also the link to the originality report, so click on it. The introductory explanation of the report is covered in the next section. 5: Results
1. The maximum file size of 20MB is absolutely huge for text alone, but many images or one embedded movie could make the file uploaded exceed the limit, so you might have to delete images or movies from a file under test and then resave it before upload. With the paper changed to have fewer pictures you should be able to upload it, in order to be able to have its text content tested. There have been some similar problems with batch submission, and they might be of value to those having difficulty with individual files too, so have a look at the batch submissions section in this guide too.
2. When the service was first set up, there was a decision that student submission would not normally be done. However, academic staff suggested a different way of using student submission to the one that Turnitin suggest - as a formative tool to improve essay writing skills - and they feel that this might remove the "us and them" atmosphere that checking everyone's essays could cause. We in LTG have documented this alternative procedure for students, and we've created instructions for staff into this manual. Those instructions are in section 11.
3. Do not let students submit appendices in different files:
Many students submit appendices separately to their main work, and this can cause confusion, as the number of files increase, and some students won't have said what's the essay and what's the appendix clearly. Try to make sure that the students put their entire work into one file, unless as mentioned in 1, above they have big pictures or movies in the document, which would make the file too big for processing.
