How to Set up a Turnitin (TII) Assignment

Owned by Liam Mason (Unlicensed)
Nov 29, 2021
5 min read

Click on Assignments in your e-Learning course, create an assignment, name the assignment [1], and give it a point value [2]. Under Submission Type select External Tool from the drop down menu [3]. Click on the Find button [4].

From the popup menu, scroll down, select Turnitin [1], then click Select [2].

 

Under Assign to you can assign the assignment to everyone or particular sections or individuals as needed [1]. Select a due date [2], then click Save [3].

NOTE: It is best practice to enter an Until date as well which is recommended to be the end date of the semester. That way, students have time to access TII feedback (if given) and read the report. Once the Until date is reached for the assignment, students will no longer be able to access TII feedback or report.

If you enter the directions in the assignment in Canvas, they will show up above the Assignment Inbox tab. The Assignment Inbox provides the number of students submitting an assignment, the assignment name, the assignment paper ID (assigned by TII for reference), the uploaded time, the grade (if you enter one using TII), the matching percentage, and the option to download the assignment.

 

The Settings tab provides the assignment title (copied over from Canvas), instructions (not copied over from canvas), the max grade or point value (copied over from canvas), the start date (copied over from canvas – it is the available from date), and the due date (copied over from canvas). If no available from date is entered, TII will supply a date.

NOTE: No hyperlinks can be made in the Instructions section of TII.

The Feedback release date (not the until date in Canvas) needs to be set manually if you use TII to make comments on the submitted paper. If you do not use TII to provide feedback, then the feedback release date and due date should be the same.

Under Allow submission of any file type, if No is selected (default), there is no restriction of file type to choose (i.e. docx or pdf). If yes is selected, TII will check and report as best it can; however, there is no guarantee.

Click Submit when you are done.

 

Under Optional settings:

[1] DO NOT allow late submissions as this potentially causes problems.

[2] Under Compare submitted papers against the following sources, check all three boxes.

[3] Under Originality Report generation and resubmissions, there are three choices in the dropdown menu:

  • Generate reports immediately (resubmissions are not allowed) – one report is generated immediately with no chance for students to make changes to the paper after they receive the report. This is the default.

  • Generate reports immediately (resubmission are allowed until due date) – students get a report, they can repeatedly make changes and resubmit the paper up until the due date.

  • Generate reports on due date (resubmission are allowed until due date) – the report is generated on the paper last submitted

[4] Under Exclude bibliographic materials from Similarity Index for all papers in this assignment, select yes or no.

[5] Under Exclude quoted materials from Similarity Index for all papers in this assignment, select yes or no.

[6] Under Exclude small matches, select yes or no (default is no). If you select yes, there are options for how many words to exclude or what percentage of words should be excluded.

[7] Under Allow students to view Originality Reports, select yes or no.

[8] Under Submissions to this assignment will be stored in, there are two choices in the dropdown menu:

  • Standard paper repository (default) – choose this option, especially if you will be having students do this assignment across multiple semesters

  • Do not store the submitted papers – if you chose this option, you will not be able to compare papers submitted for this current assignment to those papers students previously submitted either earlier or in the previous semesters. This severely hinders a text match search.

NOTE: If students are able to submit multiple times and get a report back with each submission, the subsequent reports will be near 100% if papers are stored.

[9] Under Add PeerMark assignments, select yes or no. Information on how to do PeerMark assignments is covered in another handout. PeerMark is another way to enable peer review of a submitted paper.

[10] Under Attach a rubric to this assignment, the rubric created in Canvas does not transfer over to TII. When the External Tool submission type is selected during the assignment creation, the Add rubric option in Canvas disappears.

[11] To create a rubric in TII, click on Launch Rubric Manager.

If you want to use a rubric for grading in SpeedGrader, select the Submission Type initially as Online > File Uploads (not External Tool), create the rubric, then save it. Go back in to the assignment and select External Tool as the Submission Type. The rubric will then show up in SpeedGrader. Follow these steps if you plan to use SpeedGrader to annotate comments and only need TII for a similarity report.