University of Bedfordshire
Setting up a TurnitinUK Assignment in a Blackboard unit
This guidance should be read in conjunction with the University’s policy for the use of TurnitinUK and the
Bedfordshire 2Q Feedback policy and procedures, which can be found at
http://www.beds.ac.uk/learning/assessment-feedback-via-turnitin
TurnitinUK assignments are added within the Assessment area of your Blackboard unit.
To add a TurnitinUK assignment, follow these steps:
1. First ensure you are in the right unit where
you want to provide a TurnitinUK
submission and that you are in Edit Mode.
Then, go to your unit’s Assessment area
and hover your mouse cursor over the
Create Assignment button, then click on
TurnitinUK Assignment.
2. On the New Assignment creation page,
enter the assignment title and (if you intend
to make provisional grades available to
students) the point value for the
assignment, which will be 16. This is
optional. If you make grades available you
must heavily emphasise that they are
provisional and may be subject to change.
3. Select start and due dates for the
assignment. To the right of the page you
will see options to set specific dates and
times for submission. Students are only
able to submit once the start date and time
has passed. After the due date and time,
students will be blocked unless late
submissions are enabled (see 12 below).
In Blackboard, the post date relates to the
availability of feedback only and has no
bearing on when grades are posted to the
Blackboard Gradebook.
4. Next click on the more options link and the
page will expand downwards.
5. The first box in more options provides a
space for you to add more detailed
instructions regarding the specifics of using
TurnitinUK. It is important that you give
clear guidance to students about their
submissions. Normally assignments should
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be set to be anonymous and an instruction
can be given here to help identify
assignments for a team of markers. For
example, a way to assign the right type of
assignment to co-markers in the context of
a master’s project would be to have
students name their assignment appended with the
supervisor’s name as in, Project A – Supervisorname. Similarly, where the assessment needs to be
marked by one tutor, append a relevant tag, as in
Assignment 1 – Science or perhaps Assignment 1 –
Green Group.
The following settings will only need to be made once, since at the end, you can choose to make them
your default options. They can still be changed after that.
6. Choose to generate Originality Reports for
by selecting yes to Generate Originality
Reports for Submissions?
7. Generate Originality Reports for student
submissions – it is the University’s policy
that you should always and only use the
first of the three options:
• immediately (first report is final) Originality Reports for all submissions will
be generated immediately. Students
cannot resubmit assignments.
8. Exclude bibliographic material from
Similarity Index for all papers in this
assignment?
This feature of assignment creation
provides you with the ability to control
whether bibliographic material will
automatically be excluded from Originality
Reports. The default is no, but you should
choose yes. Bibliographic materials can
also be included and excluded when
viewing the Originality Report.
In exceptional circumstances submissions can be
deleted by the instructor to enable resubmission.
This setting cannot be modified after the first paper
has been submitted and, when viewing an
assignment, you can switch this option on and off for
comparison purposes.
9. Exclude quoted material from Similarity
Index for all papers in this assignment?
This feature of assignment creation
provides instructors with the ability to
control the option whether quoted material
will automatically be excluded from
Originality Reports. The default is no.
However, provided you choose yes,
quoted materials can also be included and
excluded when viewing the Originality
Report. This setting cannot be modified
after the first paper has been submitted
and, when viewing an assignment, you can
switch this option on and off for
comparison purposes.
Quoted material is text included in an assignment
referenced and identified as a direct quote by being
started and ended with double quotation marks. A
mismatch of quotation marks “like this’ would not be
excluded. Overuse of quotation is, of course, poor
academic practice.
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10. Exclude small matches
This feature of assignment creation
provides you with the ability to
automatically exclude small matches from
all Originality Reports generated within this
assignment. To exclude small matches
click yes. Once yes has been clicked the
Exclude matches by: option window will
open. Enter into either the Word Count: or
Percentage: fields the numerical value for
small matches that will be excluded from
Originality Reports in this assignment. You
can adjust the exclude small matches
assignment setting at any time by clicking
on the edit icon to the right of the
assignment name. The excluding small
matches feature can be adjusted within
each Originality Report as well.
11. Allow Students to see Originality Reports
This feature of assignment creation
provides instructors with the ability to
control the option to allow students to see
Originality Reports within each created
assignment. This option gives you more
flexibility and control when creating
assignments. Select yes to allow students
to see the Originality Report for the
assignment. The default setting is no.
12. Late Submission
You can enable submissions after the due
date and time. To enable late submissions,
simply select yes. The default setting is no.
When enabled, students will be able to
submit papers after the due date and time
has passed as long as that student has not
already submitted a paper to the
assignment. Student submissions after the
due date and time will be flagged with red
text in the date column of the submission
in the assignment inbox.
13. Reveal grades to students only on post
date?
This feature of assignment creation
provides you with the ability to control
when grades and feedback are revealed to
students. Select yes to reveal grades and
feedback to students on the post date of
the assignment. This means that the
gradebook column will be hidden for
students until the post date.
You should set this option to 2%, not more. This will
exclude common short phrases from the checking
process.
You should advise your students on what they should
do regarding contacting you if they see a high
percentage. Bear in mind that there is no standard
‘acceptable’ value and you need to explain this to
your students.
A student cannot overwrite a submission past the
assignment due date and time, even if the late
submission option is enabled.
If no is selected, grades and feedback will be
revealed to students the instant an instructor grades
their paper. This would be unacceptable, as some
students would receive feedback well before others.
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14. Enable Anonymous Marking?
If anonymous marking is enabled for an
instructor the Enable anonymous marking
option will appear within more options. To
enable anonymous marking for an
assignment select yes from the Enable
anonymous marking? options. When
anonymous marking is enabled, the
author’s name will be anonymous until the
post date of the assignment or when an
instructor chooses to reveal the author’s
identity.
It is still possible to identify subsets of assignment by
instructing students to add a component in the name
they give the assignment they upload, such as
Assignment 1 – Science or, in the case of work for
supervisors, Project A – Supervisor-name.
15. Repository Options
You can set the Submit papers to:
assignment option to submit student
papers to the standard paper repository, in
the institution paper repository, no
repository, or to allow students to choose
between the standard paper repository or
the institution paper repository. The first
choice should be selected so that student
assignments that might in the future be
plagiarised are available to be checked.
16. The instructor is able to select the
available repository sources against which
to compare submitted assignments. This
allows an instructor to disregard a source
type if the comparison against this type of
source is not needed. Normally, all options
should be selected.
The available search targets are listed
under Search options. The targets with a
check mark are those that will be
searched. To remove a search target
repository, click on the check box to
remove the mark.
17. Changing Advanced Assignment Option
Defaults If any changes have been made
to the advanced assignment options, an
additional option will be available at the
bottom of the options panel. The instructor
is asked Would you like to save these
options as your defaults for future
assignments? Select yes to save these
advanced assignment options as the
default for all future assignments created
within this unit.
This selection will not alter any existing Originality
Reports or Overall Similarity Index scores.
These default advanced assignment options will not
apply to new assignments created in any other unit
on the Blackboard Learning System, but will be
applied to all assignments created in the current unit
by any instructor. The default settings can be
changed at any time when creating a new
assignment or updating an existing assignment.
18. Grading Online – Prevent Students seeing Grades through the Blackboard Grade Centre
If you are choosing to enter provisional grades in Turnitin while you are providing feedback, you need
to be aware of the following caveat (which appears on the Turnitin assignment setup page).
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NOTE: For assignments with Anonymous Marking enabled, the post date determines when grades
are posted to the Blackboard Gradebook and when the author names are made available. Otherwise,
in Blackboard, the post date relates to the availability of GradeMark papers only and has no bearing
on when grades are posted to the Blackboard Gradebook. (Gradebook is the old name for Grade
Centre.)
This means that, if you are not working anonymously, grades appear in the Blackboard Grade Centre
the instant you enter them in Turnitin, even if the post-date has not yet been reached. You must
ensure students cannot see grades the instant they are entered into Turnitin, by hiding the relevant
column in the Blackboard Grade Centre. This is the process.
19. In the relevant Blackboard (BREO) unit, go
to the Control Panel and click on Grade
Centre.
20. Next, click on Full Grade Centre.
21. The Grade Centre opens in the main part
of the window. Find the column for the
assignment you are about to grade – you
may need to scroll across the columns
using the scroll bar (1) until you can see
the relevant assignment column (2).
22. To the right of the column’s title, click on
the chevron button (1) and in the box that
opens, click on “Hide Column” (2).
Alternatively, click “Show / Hide to Users”,
which is an on/off switch to hide the
column from students but keep it visible to
tutors. However, this option may be more
prone to mistakenly leaving the column
visible.
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23. File Types and Size
TurnitinUK currently accepts the following file types for upload into an assignment:
• Microsoft Word® (DOC and DOCX)
• Corel WordPerfect®
• HTML
• Adobe PostScript®
• Plain text (TXT)
• Rich Text Format (RTF)
• Portable Document Format (PDF)
The file size may not exceed 20 MB. Files of larger size may be reduced in size by removal of nontext content. Files that are password protected, encrypted, hidden, system files, or read only files
cannot be uploaded or submitted to TurnitinUK. The zip file upload accepts up to 1000 files or
200MB of zipped information. A zip file to be uploaded may not exceed either limit. Zip files should
be checked to ensure only usable file formats are included in the upload.
Note: Text only files may not exceed 2 MB.
Note: PDF documents must contain text to be submitted. PDF files containing
only images of text will be rejected during the upload attempt. To determine if a document
contains actual text, copy and paste a section or all of the text into a plain-text editor such as
Microsoft Notepad or Apple TextEdit. If no text is copied over, the selection is not actual text.
Tip: Users submitting scanned images of a document or an image saved as a PDF will
need to use Optical Character Recognition (OCR) software to convert the image to a text
document. Manual correction of the resulting document is highly recommended to fix any errors
caused by the conversion software.
Note: Some document formats can contain multiple data types. This includes
text, images, embedded information from another file, and formatting.
Non-text information that is not saved directly within the document will not be included in a
file upload. This includes references to a Microsoft Excel® spreadsheet included within a
Microsoft Office Word document.
Note: Users whose files are saved in a file type that is not accepted by TurnitinUK 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.
Warning: Users who are converting to a new file format will need to save their file with a
name different to the original. Any file should be saved with a new file name when converting to
plain text or rich text formats to prevent permanent loss of the original formatting or image
content of a file.
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