Problem
Turnitin is free to use, and is now integrated with Blackboard. You do not need to create a separate account or build a course in Turnitin to check student work for plagiarism. This article outlines the steps for setting up a Turnitin Direct Assignment in Blackboard.
Environment
Blackboard (Faculty)
Resolution
1. In your Blackboard course, open up the section where you would like to post the assignment (e.g., Learning Materials, Assignments).
2. Under Assessments, select Turnitin Direct Assignment.
3. Enter an assignment name and description (no more than 2000 characters). The assignment name should not contain any special characters or punctuation.
4. Select the Submission Method: text submission (students type or paste their assignment into a text box) or file upload (students attach a file). File Upload is the preferred method.
5. Enter an Overall Grade. Note: this is not the same as the weight for the assignment. If you grade papers out of 100 points and this paper is worth 15% of their final grade, enter 100 for the overall grade.
6. Select the Number of Parts. If your assignment has multiple parts (e.g. an abstract, a paper and an annotated bibliography), you can require submissions for each part separately. Most instructors just require one part.
7. Select a Start Date, Due Date and Post Date.
- The Start Date indicates when students can begin submitting assignments.
- Students are prevented from posting after the Due Date unless late submissions are enabled.
- The Post Date refers to the availability of GradeMark papers only. This does not impact the ability to post grades to the Blackboard Grade Center.
8. Exclusions: You can choose to exclude small blocks of words, bibliographic material or quoted material from the report. It is recommended that you leave these selections with the defaults and use your own judgment when reviewing the report.
9. Use GradeMark: Turnitin has a robust grading tool that allows you to annotate and provide feedback to a paper quickly and easily. Choose Yes to grade the paper using GradeMark.
10. Repository: When a student submits a paper to Turnitin, the paper is checked against previously submitted papers, the Internet and journals and publications. Use this section to determine what Turnitin should use to check your students’ papers.
- Paper Repository: The paper is saved to a repository of student papers so that it can check future submissions against previously submitted assignments. If you would like to save papers to the repository, select Standard Repository. Otherwise, select No Repository.
- Important: If you are checking rough drafts in Turnitin, select No Repository. Otherwise, the final papers will have a high matching percentage because they match with the student’s rough draft.
- Check stored student papers/Internet/Journals and Publications: Choose whether you want Turnitin to check these databases in its search. It is recommended that you leave these with the default of Yes.
11. Grades and Assignment: For the most part, you can leave these on default with a few exceptions:
- Grading Schema: Choose the way you would like the grade to display (score, letter, etc.).
- Allow late submissions: If you would like to allow late submissions, select Yes.
- Save Instructor Defaults: If you have made selections that are not the default in this assignment, you can choose to save these as your default for Turnitin Assignments.
12. When you are finished, click Create Assignment.
Student View
The assignment will appear in Blackboard with a Turnitin icon next to it. Students click on View Assignment to upload their assignment.
To upload their papers, students should click on the Submit button in the upper right corner.
The will be prompted to enter a submission title, browse for a file to submit and check a box confirming that this is their own work.
Viewing & Grading
To view and grade assignments, click on the View Assignment link for the assignment. You will see a list of student submissions. Click on the paper name next to a student’s name to view it.
This opens up Blackboard’s Feedback Studio. The toolbar on the right indicates the options you have for viewing and marking the paper:
- Blue Check: Quick Marks. This provides you with some stamps of common feedback to save yourself from repeated typing of the same phrases. Click on a Quick Mark to view more details about it.
- Pencil and Paper: Feedback Summary. Use this space to type a text comment or record a voice comment for the paper.
- Stacks of boxes: Rubric. Click on the gear icon to create and save a rubric to use for grading Turnitin assignments (optional).
- Red number: Match overview. This provides the percentage of the paper that matches with sources found online. Links to the matching sources will be provided in the menu on the right.
- Graph: All sources. View a list of matching sources for the paper.
- Funnel: Filters and settings. Use this to exclude certain sections from the matching report.
- Circle with line: Excluded sources. If you have chosen to filter out any sources, they will appear here.
- Download icon: Download a copy of the paper, with or without annotations.
- Information icon: View information about the paper submission.
To leave direct feedback on the paper, click anywhere in the paper window where you would like to leave the comment. A box will appear with three options:
- Click on the check mark to leave a Quick Mark stamp.
- Click on the chat bubble to leave a comment. If you find yourself using this comment regularly, you will see the option to save it as a Quick Mark.
- Click on the letter T to add some text (to enter a missing word, for example).
To enter a grade for the paper, type a grade in the box in the upper right corner of the screen. This will save the grade into the Blackboard Grade Center automatically.
Tip: If the student’s paper has strange spacing or a surprisingly low word count, click on the Text-only Report button in the lower right corner. This will remove all formatting from the paper and show only text. A common trick from those attempting to “cheat” the system is to enter the letter X in white text between words to prevent it from recognizing matches to other sources.
Cause
Turnitin checks papers for text similarity against Internet resources, scholarly databases and previously submitted papers.Turnitin is free to use, and is now integrated with Blackboard. You do not need to create a separate account or build a course in Turnitin to check student work for plagiarism.