Create an assignment

Turnitin assignments must be created within a Blackboard course. Once created, the Turnitin assignment automatically synchronises with the student enrolments of the Blackboard course and an account is created for all enrolled teaching staff. 

We recommended that you contact your Ed Tech team to ensure that a Turnitin assignment is the most appropriate option to use.

Follow the steps below to create a Turnitin assignment. For a detailed guide on how to set up an assignment, please see the Turnitin website.

  1.  Go to bb.imperial.ac.uk, enter your Imperial College username and password and log in  
  2. Navigate to the course and content area that you would like to create a Turnitin assignment in  
  3. Select the Build Content drop-down menu, then select  Turnitin Assignment  
  4. On the assignment creation page, you can either copy the settings from a previous assignment, or enter an Assignment title and an optional  Point value 
  5. Select a Start date and Due date for the assignment. Students are only able to submit once the  Start date has passed. After the Due date, students will not be able to submit unless Late submissions are enabled. The Feedback Release Date relates to when grades are available to students through the Turnitin assignment. It has no bearing on when grades are sent to the Blackboard Grade Centre 
  6. Click on Optional Settings to further configure the assignment. 
In this section, there are various settings that can affect the work submitted by students. The key settings are looked at in more detail below.

Turnitin Staff

Similarity Report

There are various options available with regards to generating originality reports, the first being if you would like these to be used for the assignment. Set Generate Similarity Reports for submissions? to Yes if you would like them to be generated for this assignment.

Immediately first report is final

This option does not let student resubmit after their first submission. A Similarity Report will be visible to teachers and the student (if you have given permission for this). The report is usually generated within 15 minutes. However, it may take up to 24 hours during peak submissions times.

Immediately (can overwrite reports until the due date)

This option allows students to have the opportunity to resubmit their paper and make changes based on feedback from the originality report. If they make changes to their paper and then they resubmit, this will overwrite the previous submission. 

On due date

The students will be able to resubmit many times until the due date. Each submission will overwrite the previous (even if the name has changed). However, on the due date, the system will make an Originality Report for the last item that was submitted. This will just generate the report for you and the student (if you have given permission for the students to see the report) on the due date.

You can turn off the ability for students to view Originality Reports through the Allow students to see Originality Report option. 

For further information regarding setting up the Similarity Report for a Turnitin assignment, see the Turnitin help website. 

Turnitin Repositories

When a student submits a paper to Turnitin, it can be stored in one of the Turnitin repositories. You can choose which repository student work will be stored in. The choice of certain repositories will allow staff at other Universities to compare their student submissions with your students’ submissions. 

Standard paper repository

This enables other institutions to compare their submissions with these submissions. The entire submission cannot be viewed without permission the permission of a teacher on the course.

Institution paper repository

This enables Imperial College users (and no one else) to compare their submissions with these submissions.

Student’s choice of repository

This gives students the choice of repository.

No repository

The assignment is not stored by Turnitin. With this option no one will be able to compare their submissions with these submissions. This is useful for PhD theses or sensitive papers, however, you would not be able to check for collusion between students. This is a good option when you want to obtain a similarity report for a particular paper but you don’t want then submission to be stored for future checks.