Quick guides to the new sunspace
Turnitin/grademark trouble-shooting advice
Due to the nature of the turnitin interface in the new SunSpace, it is important to follow the instructions in the one-page handouts (e.g. handouts 25 and 29) in the SunSpace Resources module, and to direct students to read the instructions in the Student Orientation Tutorial before submitting their work. However there may be occasions where due to technical issues or human error, the interface does not perform as expected. This handout describes the most common problems and what action you can take.
Index of Problems
1.Students are reporting that the system won’t let them submit work
2.Students are getting errors when they submit work
3.Students say they are not getting a receipt so they don’t know if they submitted work to turnitin successfully
4.Students are submitting work late despite you having set it not to allow late work
5.Students are not seeing a turnitin similarity score in the dropbox outbox after submitting
6.Students have multiple submissions and you don’t know which one to mark
7.Some students don’t have anything in the ‘turnitin’ column in the dropbox
8.A student has a red error symbol instead of a similarity score
9.You want to submit work on behalf of a student
10.Students can’t see their marked work
11.You (or an external examiner) can’t see the marked work to moderate
1.Students are reporting that the system won’t let them submit work
Determine which of the following situations has occurred and take the recommended action:
(1)You have not yet set up a dropbox basket for the assignment. Click on dropbox to list the dropbox baskets, and if yours is missing, set one up.
(2)You have prevented access to the dropbox using the module scheduler. Check the date settings and remove any restrictions you did not intend.
(3)Check turnitin Start Date to make sure the start date has been reached. There is also a bug which may delay the start by a few hours in the unusual situation where you are setting up the dropbox after 8am on the assignment due date. In this situation you may need to extend your deadline by a day or so to allow students the opportunity to submit. This bug is due to be fixed in mid January 2013.
2.Students are getting errors when they submit work
If this is a technical error message (rare), the only advice is to wait and resubmit later. Most commonly students submit work successfully, but turnitin processing is prevented for some reason. Students may be seeing a red error symbol like or . Advise them to mouse over the symbol for further information about the cause of the error, and take the actions recommended under the problem8.Astudent has a red error symbol instead of a similarity score.
3.Students say they are not getting a receipt so they don’t know if they submitted work to turnitin successfully
The new sunspace does not provide receipts, but students should be able to see immediately that their assignment has registered in their dropbox outbox. This will display a date and time and a link to their assignment. This is their proof of submission. If they want a receipt they can print one off once their similarity score has been processed, normally within 15 minutes.
4.Students are submitting work late despite you having set it not to allow late work
Rather than using the turnitin setting Allow submissions after the due date to prevent late submissions, you need to use the module scheduler. In the module scheduler, find the item to which you attached the dropbox basket, select Assign specific start/end and set the End Date to the assignment deadline (set a Start date in the past). In the End Date section, check the box to
This will prevent dilatory students from being able to submit to the associated dropbox basket after the deadline, but will not prevent other students seeing their marked work.
5.Students are not seeing a turnitin similarity score in the dropbox outbox after submitting
Students will normally see the blue ‘processing’ symbol for at least 15 minutes after submission. If they are not seeing a symbol at all, this is either because they did not submit their assignment as an attachment, or because you set the turnitin settings so that students would not be able to see their similarity scores. If you intended students to be able to see their similarity scores, make sure you set this up as a turnitin assignment (checkbox in the dropbox), and in the turnitin settings that you setGenerate Originality Reports for submissions to andAllow students to see Originality Reports to (if you have set Allow submissions after the due date to then late work will not receive a similarity score – it is better to prevent late submissions using the method described for problem4.Students are submitting work late despite you having set it not to allow late work).
You (or the student) can check whether they attached the assignment, by looking in the paperclip column in the dropbox. This should show a (doc) symbol to indicate an attachment. If the attachment is missing, they will need to resubmit their assignment but this time make sure they include it as an attachment.
If students are telling you that they are just getting the processing symbol and no similarity score, remind them that they may have to wait 15 minutes (for a first submission) or 24 hours (for a second submission), or longer at busy times of year. However you should also check your turnitin setting for Generate Originality Reports for student submissions.If this is set to
then students should be able to see their similarity scores. However if you are deliberately using then you will need to tell students that similarity scoreswill only appear after assignment deadline has passed.
6.Students have multiple submissions and you don’t know which one to mark
This problem only occurs if you are trying to mark assignments by cycling from one assignment to the next using the forward and back arrows at the top right of the Grademark screen. The marking method we recommend to get around this problem is to progress from one student to the next by clicking their turnitin similarity scores in the far right-hand column in the dropbox inbox, as shown here.
When you finish marking one student and want to open the next, close the Grademark window to expose the dropbox view again, or click the browser tab to take you back to SunSpace, select the next student, and tab back to Grademark (if you have a wide screen you could place the two windows side by side, as shown below, making the process much faster).
7.For some students on the module there is nothing at all in the ‘turnitin’ column in the dropbox
If some students on the module have similarity scores, but a few do not, the most likely explanation is that those students submitted their assignments incorrectly by pasting them into the editor box rather than attaching them. They need to be submitted as attachments in order for them to register in turnitin. To check whether the student has made this mistake, click on the student’s name. If there is no symbol in the paperclip column for the assignment, and instead you can see text from the assignment, then they have made this mistake and you need to email them to ask them to resubmit the assignment. They need to follow the instructions and make sure they attach the assignment.
Occasionally due to a technical issue (if a student clicks twice on submit by mistake), you will instead find that a student submitted correctly with an attachment, but then made a second blank submission. In this case, you need to delete the accidental blank submission (be careful not to click twiceyourself!).
8.A student has a red error symbol instead of a similarity score
Red error symbols are produced by turnitin, not by SunSpace itself. There are a huge variety of causes. There are two symbols with different meanings. This one occurs when turnitin is having difficulty coping with demand, and is temporary. Once the turnitin servers have dealt with the backlog, a normal similarity report will appear. So just check back in later if you’re seeing these symbols.
The one you need to take action on is the symbol, which usually requires asking students to resubmit. Mouse over the symbol to find out what the cause is. If the error is a technical one, such as difficulty matching user ID, contact the student and ask them to resubmit, and report the problem to the sunspace team.
The most common reason for errors is students submitting work as Open Office (odt) files, which turnitin seems to be having trouble with, despite saying that it accepts odt files. You will need to email the student and ask them to save the file as arich text file (rtf) or pdf, in order to have it accepted by turnitin.
Turnitin will also produce errors if students are submitting pictures with insufficient amounts of text (because it foils the plagiarism checker if text is converted into pictures to prevent optical character reading). Ask students to submit as text files. If you are marking pictorial assignments you can just use a dropbox assignment without using turnitin, and mark it within SunSpace not in Grademark.
If the work is late, see problem 4.Students are submitting work late despite you having set it not to allow late work.
Other errors may indicate mistakes on the student’s part, such as accidentally submitting an early draft of the assignment (less than 20 words).
Note that it is not possible for you to submit an assignment on behalf of a student. If a student is unable to submit or emails you an assignment because of the problems with the interface, see the next heading.
9.You can’t see any record of which assignments you have marked
If you are typing marks and comments into turnitin Grademark, nothing will be visible of this in the dropbox once you have closed the marked assignment. Don’t worry – the marks and comments are still saved in turnitin. The easiest way to make sure you can see the marks in the dropbox to give you an overview of which ones have been marked is to set up the Gradebook (see SunSpace Resources module for instructions on how to do this). When you do this, two grading columns will appear in the dropbox. Every time you mark an assignment, type the mark into the Numeric Grade column.
This does mean students will see their marks before they go in to look at their feedback. To save yourself typing the same mark twice, if you enter the mark here in the dropbox there is no need to also enter it in Grademark. (Eventually when the turnitin/sunspace integration is finished, marks typed in Grademark will automatically be updated in the gradebook)
10.You want to submit work on behalf of a student
If a student has emailed you an assignment which they are unable to submit, there is no facility for you to submit it on their behalf. You should ask the student to try submitting again later. As a last resort, if it is impractical to ask a student to resubmit later, you can contact the sunspace team, sending them the student assignment and the student name and user ID, and one of the learning technologists can log in under the student’s name and submit the assignment as if they were the student.
11.Students can’t see their marked work
That is, you have marked their work in Grademark but students are saying they can’t see it. The most common cause of this problem is lecturer error. Firstly you need to have ‘returned’ work to students through the dropbox (their assignments should be in your dropbox outbox not in the inbox). Secondly the turnitin settings need to be right. Make sure that the ‘Post date’ (date at which students can see their grademark feedback) has already been reached. If not, set the post date to now. Check that the option Allow students to see Originality Reports is set to
If you had already done all these things, then check that students have correctly followed the instructions for accessing their marked work.
12.You (or an external examiner) can’t see the marked work to moderate
If marked work has already been returned to students, it will not appear in the dropbox inbox, and the dropbox outbox does not list the turnitin similarity scores for accessing the grademark window. However you can access the assignments in turnitin, using the following procedure:
In Dropbox, click the Editbutton for any assignment to obtain another list:
Click Settings for the assignment. This takes you into the assignment settings page in turnitin.
Click on the name of your assignment in the breadcrumbs, and the list of students and their marks will then be displayed.
You can then click on the Grade for each student to view the assignment with the Grademark comments (exactly as you did in WebCT).
Date / Version / Author(s) / Distribution / Notes15/01/2013 / 1.00 / Core team / Sunspace Resources
18/01/2013 / 2.00 / Core team / Sunspace Resources
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