Using Turnitin to check possible plagiarism in your essay assignments? Check the assignment settings at the beginning of each course, especially after a course copy, to avoid errors caused by date conflicts!
BEST Practice: CREATE A FRESH ASSIGNMENT EACH COURSE
To avoid recurring issues with old Turnitin assignments, our strongest recommendation is to create a fresh assignment at the beginning of each new course. This ensures all settings are correct from the start and prevents the backend conflicts that can happen with copied content.
If that’s not possible, at the start of each course, check your assignment settings and update the Submission Type.
Try it! | Step-by-step Guide
- Identify the Assignment: Go to Assignments and click on the assignment that uses Turnitin.
- Edit the Assignment: Click on the Edit button to change the assignment settings. Some assignment setup uses Turnitin as an External Tool, this is not recommended.
- Change the Submission Type to Online, tick File Uploads, and the Plagiarism Review box will appear.
- Ensure Turnitin Plagiarism Framework is used, then click Save.
- Duplicate the Assignment: the interface now goes back to Assignments list.
- Locate the assignment that has the Turnitin issue (the one you just saved). Click on the three-dots on its right-hand side.
- Select Duplicate to make a copy of the assignment.
- Edit the Assignment: Go to the duplicated assignment and click on the Edit button in the top right corner of the page. The title would indicate that it is a copy!
- Plagiarism Review: Scroll down to the Plagiarism Review and ensure Turnitin Plagiarism Framework is selected, then use the Standard paper repository, tick all items under Compare submissions against and Similarity Report. Tick Save as default settings.
- Note that this may seem like a repeat of a previous step, but it forces a reset of the settings.
- Save and Publish: Scroll to the bottom of the page and click Save. Make sure this updated assignment is published for students to access. And delete the old one to clear the confusion.
The assignment should now be working properly.
Hints and Tips
- What if this doesn’t work?
- If you have tried the steps above and are still having issues, please create a new Turnitin assignment.
- If the problem persists, reach out to one of the partners at academicpartner@manukau.ac.nz and we can support you with the technical side.