Turnitin – Student FAQs

Grademark is the name of an Electronic submission/Marking/Feedback system. It has been made by Turnitin, the same company who provide the plagiarism checking system. Submissions are made online. They are marked online and feedback is returned online.

Finding your submission point.

To submit your assignment to Turnitin you will need to:

• Login to Blackboard
• Select the module in which the assignment was set from your current modules list
• Click the “Assignments” (or similarly named, actual term is college dependant) tab in the left hand menu
• Find the correct assignment from the list on the page and click “View/Complete”

Uploading and submitting.

Having done this you will land on your assignment inbox page. Next, click the highlighted blue “Submit” button.

Your details should appear in the name fields on the upload page. You will need to give your submission a title. Most Colleges insist on this being prefaced with your student number … eg “67344 – this is my essay”.

There is a choice of places which Turnitin will allow you to browse to for your saved assignment file. This could be directly from your computer, a Dropbox account or a Google drive file store.

Browse to the appropriate file, highlight it, and then click the Blue highlighted “Upload” button.

This will upload the file and produce a small preview file on the screen. NOTE: your assignment has not yet been submitted.

When you are sure you have uploaded the correct file, complete your submission by clicking the blue highlighted “Confirm” button.

If you have selected the wrong file, click “cancel” and browse for the right one.

Evidencing your Submission, Turnitin submission ID’s and digital receipts.

Having submitted your assignment, you will land on a confirmatory receipt page; at the bottom of which (you may need to scroll down to see it) you should find your Submission ID. This is an 8 digit number. You should take a note of this number as it is the only evidence you will have for your submission at this point. Write it down, or, you could take a screenshot of the page and save that.

Whilst you should receive an e-mailed receipt from the system, if this is late or does not appear, you would still need your paper number if you needed to evidence your submission. If no receipt appears on the screen, you should not assume your submission has been accepted. If you believe you have had a problem, contact IT support in the main catalogue hall of the library for further help. If you cannot physically attend, phone ext. 5060, or 295060 if outside of campus.

If you click “Return to assignment list” and click on “view”, a new window will pop up, showing your assignment in the document viewer. In the bottom bar of this window you will see a printer Icon, clicking this will bring up a choice of three options, you need to select “Download PDF of Digital Receipt for printing”.

Choose whether to open or save the file. To print, open the file and click the printer Icon at the top of the screen then OK the print request box to send your receipt to the printer.

Post-dates

Feedback from Grademark becomes available for you to collect online after what is known as the “Post-date”. This is a date and time specified by your College or lecturer. If you are unsure as to the Post Date for your assignment, please contact your lecturer or College Office.

No-one in the class ought to be able to access their feedback until the Post–date has passed.

Accessing Feedback

Once your Post-Date has passed, you can collect your feedback.

To do this:

• Login to Blackboard with your usual username and password
• Select the module in which the assignment was set from your list of current modules
• Click the “Assignments” (or similarly named, again, the actual term is college dependant) tab in the left hand menu
• Find the correct assignment in the list and click on “View / Complete”
• On the new page, click on the “View” button

A new window will pop up, showing your assignment in the document viewer. This will display your script on the left hand portion of the screen.

To scroll through the script use the vertical scroll bar between the script and the General comments side pane. If the text appears as too large or too small, this can be zoomed in or out by using the small scroll bar in the Bottom bar of the document viewer.

Depending how your marker has worked, you may notice comments, or blue boxes left in your paper. The blue boxes contain further comments. Hovering your mouse over the box will cause it to expand, showing the comment that had been left. These comments are the equivalent of those that would have been written onto the paper by the marker back in the days of hard copy marking. In the right hand Pane you will find the General Comments section. This is where the marker will have left their overall impressions of the essay/assignment.

Assuming that you are not right up against the deadline, the first port of call would be IT support, who would try to help with your submission, or would pass you through to the SALT team if they could not solve the issue.

If you are on Campus you can find the IT support desk in the main catalogue hall of the library, alongside the Issue Desk. This is the preferable option as staff will be able to see what is happening when the fault occurs, making it easier to troubleshoot. However, if you are not able to get to the desk, you can phone them on ext. 5060 or 295060 from an outside line.

If you are worried because you have left it until the last minute to submit and you think you may now not make the deadline, make sure you contact either the lecturer responsible for the assignment and or your college office. They should be able to advise you on what steps your college would like you to take in these circumstances. For example, they may suggest that you turn in a hard copy at the office, or e-mail a digital copy to them as evidence that you were there in time even if you failed to submit through the system. Processes for such occurrences may vary from college to college, so do make sure you seek advice from those concerned, rather than just from a friend who had previously had been in this situation.

To check that your assignment is appearing on the system, click on “Assignments” button in the menu. Then, from the Inbox select the blue “View” button. This will open your assignment in a new “Document Viewer” format.

If you have been through submission, as outlined in the “How can I prove that I have made a submission ?” section, you ought to have saved the Paper number which appeared on the receipt that appears as a part of the process. You will absolutely need this number if your case needs to be referred to Turnitin for a search.

There has been a recent increase to the file size limit in Turnitin. You may now submit files of up to 40 Mb.

However, if you are submitting to an old module (14/15 or earlier) you will still be limited to the old size of 20 Mb. This will predominantly be Health Science students.

If you are at all concerned as to whether this effects you please contact blackboard@swan.ac.uk, or in the case of CHHS students, you can contact Rachel Singleton for advice, r.m.singleton@swan.ac.uk

If you are having problems submitting due to file size and you have used images or illustrations within the assignment, try resizing the images. This does not mean physically changing the picture size, but rather reducing the resolution of the image. Files of larger size may be reduced in size by removal of non-text content.

If the assignment is to be run through the plagiarism checker it would have to be one of the following file types:

• Microsoft Word® (DOC and DOCX)
• Corel WordPerfect®
• HTML
• Adobe PostScript®
• Plain text (TXT)
• Rich Text Format (RTF)
• Portable Document Format (PDF)
• Hangul (HWP)
• Powerpoint (PPT and PPTS)

If there is no call for checking Originality and the assignment has been set to take any file, then any file type is acceptable.