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Turnitin for Students: Submit an Assignment to the Turnitin Dropbox (Moodle)

Summary

In Moodle, your instructor may provide a Turnitin dropbox for you to submit an assignment instead of a regular assignment dropbox.

Turnitin provides the opportunity for students and instructors to check their papers for originality.

View the complete Student User Guide for instructions for submitting assignments via Turnitin or follow this quick guide below.

Steps:

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2) Read and follow assignment and submission directions provided by your instructor. Locate and click Submit Paper icon in lower right. 

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3) A pop-up window will appear allowing you to submit your paper. Enter title, browse or drag desired file, click Add Submission. You will receive a digital receipt. 

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Note: The Grading Rubric (if available) is accessible on the screen after the student clicks the Add Submission button. See below:

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About Turnitin File Requirements 

Student guide - Turnitin File Requirements
Submitting a PDF

If the file you are trying to upload or display is a PDF and you are encountering problems, please check the following settings using Adobe® Reader:

  • Open the PDF in Adobe Reader.
  • From the 'File' menu, select 'Properties.' 
  • Select the following tabs and check to see what they contain:

(a).  Security tab - Check to see if both 'Page Extraction' and 'Content Copying' are set to 'Allowed'. If they are not, then Turnitin may not be able to extract the text to allow the system to work. (The solution is to ensure that a new PDF is created which allows copying and extraction).
(b).  Font tab -  If some fonts have (embedded subset) next to their names, then this may explain why the submission has failed, as our system has not been able to extract the text associated with those fonts. (This is often linked to (a) above).

  • Verify that the PDF is text-based (image-based PDFs are not supported for Similarity Check). Proceed to highlight the text of your document with your mouse. If you are not able to highlight any text, your PDF is an image and does not contain text. Another option is to try a 'Save As' or 'Save as Other' and save to a .txt file. If the resulting .txt file is empty, then no text can be rendered from the document.
  • Verify that the PDF is not a 'Portfolio' containing multiple files. If the 'File' menu option shows 'Portfolio Properties' rather than the 'Properties' option, the file type is not supported.
  • Verify that the PDF is not a form. If you are prompted to 'Please fill out the following form,' within Adobe Reader, the file type is not supported.

To resolve this, the student would need to recreate the PDF following the above guidelines.

Submitting a MS Word Document

Docx files can fail for a number of reasons, such as unusual formatting found within the document, an unsupported file type being changed to .docx, or the file may be corrupted. There is also a current known issue affecting some .docx files that has been brought to the attention of our Engineering Team and is currently being investigated.

The issue involves Microsoft files generated using Windows, which have been found to occasionally fail to process when uploaded to Turnitin.

Information about this has been published on our known issues page as well.

If the issue persists, we recommend students try saving and re-submitting papers in one of the other supported file types as this has been known to be a successful workaround to the problem. For example, if a paper was saved in Microsoft Word (.docx) format, try saving and re-submitting in the Portable Document Format (.pdf).

Please note, if the reason the file has been rejected by Turnitin is the file itself, then the 'Resubmit to Turnitin' button will return the same result.

Seek Further Assistance


For additional assistance please contact, Clarkson OIT Help Desk;

Email: helpdesk@clarkson.edu
Call: 315-268-HELP (x4357)

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