Excluding submitted material and checking references
I've just had my first experience of using Turnitin and Feedback Studio for marking coursework essays. It didn't go well. I found multiple instances of students using too much text from their cited sources, having re-worded, edited or rearranged parts of them to various degrees. The Turnitin similarity scores were mostly pointless, as automatic matching was being made to other student submissions (which are inaccessible) rather than the original sources.
A great feature would be to be able to exclude all previous student submitted material as matched sources and/or to check sources in the reference list as a priority.
Also, very useful would be to be able to use the hyperlinks in the student's document and/or copy and paste from it to a browser. As I couldn't do either of these I had to manually search for each source in the reference list to manually check for similarity. This took A REALLY LONG TIME! I got very angry, frustrated and stressed having to find workarounds to work out what I thought Turnitin should have done automatically.
I tried all sorts of online help to find better answers, but there didn't seem to be any. I also have quite a long list of other characteristics of Turnitin and/or Feedback Studio that were annoying or unhelpful, if the developers are listening.
2 replies
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Hello,
Thanks for your feedback, you will be glad to know that we are working on some features to allow greater customization of the similarity report including the sequence in which matches are identified and presented to instructors.
There are a few options available to you currently you can exclude student submission sources in the report by using the Exclude Sources feature in the report: link to guide: https://help.turnitin.com/feedback-studio/turnitin-website/instructor/similarity-report-exclusions/excluding-sources.htm
The Match Overview function allows you to view the the similar text in the full source and includes a clickable link that takes you to the source if required: link to guide: https://help.turnitin.com/feedback-studio/turnitin-website/instructor/the-similarity-report/viewing-similarity-matches.htm
The All sources function will list all sources including all internet sources by clicking on the source in the list the location will be displayed in the document, including those which are included in a larger (%) source: link to guide: https://help.turnitin.com/feedback-studio/turnitin-website/instructor/the-similarity-report/viewing-sources.htm
Finally when creating the assignment in the advanced options fields, you can select to not check for similarity against previous student submissions using the search options. Link to the guide that explains the options: https://help.turnitin.com/feedback-studio/turnitin-website/instructor/assignment-management/advanced-similarity-report-settings.htm
Hope this of some help to you.
Alistair