Managing Turnitin assignment submissions in Blackboard

Quick guide for Instructors

Turnitin is anti-plagiarism software that supports the detection of plagiarism by identifying student work that contains unoriginal material.

Note: Assignments created via Turnitin are held in the Turnitin database and so are not listed in the Assignments tool in the Course Tools menu in Blackboard. To access a Turnitin assignment, click on its icon or title in the course content.

Submit single student submissions
Submit multiple student submissions as a zip file
Organise the Turnitin assignment inbox
View an originality report
Grade a Turnitin assignment submission
Edit a grade for a Turnitin paper
Download a Turnitin paper
View and download class statistics
Delete a Turnitin assignment submission

Submit single student submissions

Instructors can submit assignments to the Turnitin database on behalf of students. You can submit a single file or multiple submissions as a zip file.

1. Click on the Teach tab.

2. Go to the Turnitin assignment and click on its icon or title. You will see the Turnitin assignment inbox.

3. Click the submit paper button.

4. Select single file upload from the choose a paper submission method: drop-down list.

5. Select a student from the author drop-down list.

6. Type in a title for the submission.

7. Click the Browse button and locate the paper.

8. Click upload. You will be asked to confirm the text of the submission. Click submit.

Note: Turnitin will only accept files in the following formats: MS Word (doc or docx), WordPerfect, HTML, RTF, PDF, PostScript, and plain text formats. Turnitin does not accept powerpoint or spreadsheet files or files saved in Microsoft Works or AppleWorks.

Submit multiple student submissions as a zip file

1. Click on the Teach tab.

2. Go to the Turnitin assignment and click on its icon or title. You will see the assignment inbox.

3. Click the submit paper button.

4. Select zip file upload from the choose a paper submission method: drop-down list.

5. Click the Browse button and locate the zip file containing the assignments you want to submit.

6. Click upload to view the assignments in the zip file.

7. For each of the document you have submitted, select a student from the drop down list or type a name and title.

8. Click submit to upload the assignments.

9. You will be asked to confirm the accepted file of the submission. Click submit.

Note: Zip file may contain up to 1000 files or up to 200 megabytes.

Organise the Turnitin assignment inbox

1. Click on the Teach tab.

2. Go to the Turnitin assignment and click on its icon or title. You will then be taken to the Turnitin assignment inbox. Here you can:

   • sort by column header: click on the headings of the author, title, report view details, date or any other columns displayed as links to sort papers by any of these criteria.

   • sort by folder: you can move selected papers into either the viewed or marked folders by clicking on the box next to the author and clicking the move to button in the row just above the column headers.

   • delete unwanted papers: you can delete papers at any time by clicking on the box next to the author and clicking the delete button. You will need to confirm that you wish to delete the paper.
     Note: The paper will be deleted from the assignment inbox but not from the Turnitin database.

View an originality report

1. Click on the Teach tab.

2. Go to the Turnitin assignment and click on its icon or title. You will then see the assignment inbox.

3. Click on the all papers tab.

4. In the report view detail column, click on the coloured indices for the relevant assignment submission. The report will open in a new window.

5. Close the window to return to the assignment inbox.

Note: For more information on how to read an originality report, refer to the Reading a Turnitin assignment originality report quick guide.

Note: The time taken for the Originality Report to appear can be a few minutes or greater than 24 hours for the first submission. For subsequent submissions, the report will not appear for at least 24 hours.

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Grade a Turnitin assignment submission

1. Click on the Teach tab.

2. Go to the Turnitin assignment and click on its icon or title. You will see the Turnitin assignment inbox.

3. Click on the title of the assignment submission you wish to grade. The document will open in a new window showing the title, author, date submitted, paper id and word count.

4. Type the grade in the grade for this paper field at the top right of the window and press enter. Close the window to return to the Turnitin assignment inbox.

5. To save the grade so that it will appear in the Blackboard Grade Book, click on the 'Roster Sync' Link on the right of the Turnitin assignment inbox.

*NB - Roster Sync to Blackboard's Grade Book will not work for submissions from Demo Student (Student View).

Edit a grade for a Turnitin assignment submission

Note: A change made to a grade via the Turnitin assignment inbox will be reflected in the Blackboard Grade Book but a change made to a grade via the Blackboard Grade Book will not be reflected in the Turnitin assignment inbox.

1. Click on the Teach tab.

2. Go to the Turnitin assignment and click on its icon or title. You will see the assignment inbox.

3. Click on the title of the assignment submission for which you wish to change the grade. The document will open in a new window.

4. Type the new grade in the grade for this paper field at the top right of the window and press enter.

5. Close the window to return to the Turnitin assignment inbox.

6. To update the grade so that it will also appear ammended in the Blackboard Grade Book, click on the 'Roster Sync' Link on the right of the Turnitin assignment inbox.

*NB - Roster Sync to Blackboard's Grade Book will not work for submissions from Demo Student (Student View).

Download a Turnitin assignment submission

1. Click on the Teach tab.

2. Go to the Turnitin assignment and click on its icon or title. You will see the assignment inbox.

3. Click on the all papers tab.

4. Click on the box next to author for the submission(s) you wish to download. If you want to download all submissions, click on the box to the column head for author.

5. Click the download button.

6. Save the archived zip file to the preferred location on your computer. You will need to extract the documents from the downloaded zip file.

View and download class statistics

1. Click on the Teach tab.

2. Go to the Turnitin assignment and click on its icon or title. You will then see the assignment inbox.

3. Click on the class stats tab at the top of the window. You will see a table of cumulative statistics for each Turnitin assignment created for the unit.

4. To download the class statistics to an Excel spreadsheet, click on the export to excel button. Then save the file to your preferred location.

Delete a Turnitin assignment submission

You can delete a submission from the Turnitin assignment inbox in Blackboard. Note, however, that the submission will still exist in the Turnitin database.

1. Click on the Teach tab.

2. Go to the Turnitin assignment and click on its icon or title. You will then see the assignment inbox.

3. Click on the all papers tab.

4. Click on the box next to author for the submission you wish to delete.

5. Click the delete button. You will be asked to confirm that you wish to delete the assignment.

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