What to do when Turnitin doesn’t generate a similarity report?

Table of Contents

1 How similarity reports are normally generated
2 When a similarity report isn’t generated

How similarity reports are normally generated

When Moodle sends a submission to Turnitin, it can take several minutes to an hour for the similarity report to become available. The length of of time is dependent upon the volume of traffic to Turnitin at the time.

Typically, a notification will appear for a submission to indicate that it is being queued, with a Turnitin ID being assigned shortly afterwards.

A similarity percentage score should then appear in the assignment submission area shortly afterwards. You can access the similarity report by clicking on this percentage score.

When a similarity report isn’t generated

Occasionally, a submission doesn’t make its way to the Turnitin service and you have to manually push the submission through to Turnitin. Any submissions with the 'Resubmit to Turnitin' message will need to be manually re-submitted by clicking on the message. Once you have done so, the submission should be queued, assigned with a Turnitin ID, and processed as normal.

There are times when a report is not generated for a submission. In these cases, you will see a red ‘X' where the percentage score would normally be visible. In some cases, the Turnitin status may have remained as 'Pending’ for some time after the submission deadline. This also can indicates that a similarity reports report has failed to generate.

There are several reasons why a similarity report might not have generated, including:

Turnitin Service Disruption

During a Turnitin service disruption, the generation of similarity reports may be affected. You can visit the Turnitin system status page to check for any service disruptions or scheduled maintenance.

What happens if Turnitin is down when my students try to submit their work?

Turnitin outages will not affect Moodle assignments and files submitted by students will still be securely saved and available for grading and management in Moodle.

Similarity reports may be slightly delayed if Turnitin goes down; however, Moodle will keep automatically resubmitting the paper until service is restored, at which point the similarity report will be generated.

Typically, no further action will be required in Moodle to make this happen. Although, in some cases you may be required to manually push the submission through to Turnitin. Any submissions with the 'Resubmit to Turnitin' message will need to be manually re-submitted by clicking on that message and they should then be queued, assigned with a Turnitin ID, and processed.

Turnitin settings within the Moodle assignment set up

If a number of similarity reports have yet to be generated, check the Moodle assignment settings to determine when reports are set to generate. This is managed by the Turnitin plugin setting called ‘Report Generation Speed’.

If the assignment has been set to generate reports immediately (students can resubmit until due date), the similarity reports will be generated for every draft a student submits, overwriting each time. After the third submission there will be a delay of 24 hours before the next report is generated.

If the assignment has been set to generate reports on the due date (students can resubmit until due date), the similarity reports will only be generated for the final file a student submits for an assignment and will become available once the assignment due date/time have passed.

Submission of an unsupported file type/format

If only a limited number of similarity reports have yet to be generated, it may be that the student/students uploaded a file type that is accepted by Moodle but that is not on Turnitin’s list of approved file types. The submission will still be accepted for the assignment but no similarity report will be generated. You can pre-empt this by limiting submissions to only the file types allowed by Turnitin.

If you notice that a student has submitted an unsupported file type before the due date, the student should re-submit the file in a supported format.

For support in instances where the deadline has already passed, please contact eden.digital@lse.ac.uk.

For a list of both supported file types and incompatible file types and formats, please see Turnitin’s File requirements page.

Although PowerPoint files are supported, there are instances where Turnitin cannot generate a similarity report because it cannot read the text:

text with visual effects such as ‘shadow’ or ‘3D’ applied. Such visual effects should be removed before submission.
PowerPoints using the ‘Slate’ theme render the text unselectable by Turnitin

To ensure PDF submissions can be read by Turnitin, the following PDF generators should not be used: LaTeX PDF generator, OpenOffice PDF generator or LibreOffice PDF generator.

Student failure to accept the End-User License Agreement (EULA)

When submitting a file to Turnitin, all users are required to accept the most recent End-User License Agreement (EULA). This includes those are submitting to Turnitin for the first time as well as those who have submitted to Turnitin previously. If the EULA is not accepted, the file will not be submitted to Turnitin and a similarity report will not be generated.

In such cases, students will see see a message like the one in the screenshot below. This can cause some students to panic but they should be reassured that, although their work hasn’t been submitted to Turnitin, it has been submitted to Moodle, which is the more critical submission point.

For a similarity report to be generated, the student will need to return to the assignment submission area and click on the prompt to accept the EULA. The student will then need to be ‘allowed another attempt’ in order for the file to be submitted to Turnitin and an originality report generated. Although, if the Moodle assignment due date has already passed then please contact the Eden.Digital (eden.digital@lse.ac.uk) team to discuss an alternative method to obtaining the similarity report for the submission.