Submitting a Turnitin Assignment

Submitting a Turnitin Assignment

New: Watch a closed-captioned movie that shows you how to submit a Turnitin assignment to a BeachBoard course [opens in a new window]

Turnitin is a plagiarism prevention service available in BeachBoard. Students submit their papers electronically, and Turnitin compares the text of those papers to the text in billions of other documents on the Internet, in papers submitted by other students around the world, and in articles located in commercial databases of journals and periodicals . Whenever similarities between the text in a student's paper and the text in an existing document are found, Turnitin highlights those similarities, returning an annotated document to the instructor showing both the student's paper and the original source.

By default, Turnitin permanently retains a copy of all submitted papers for the purpose of ensuring that those papers are not plagiarized by future students.

To paraphase a recent recommendation from the CSU General Counsel:  

Instructors may request the submission of course papers to Turnitin.com for the prevention of plagiarism. All submitted papers are included as source documents in the Turnitin.com reference database solely for the purpose of detecting plagiarism of such papers. You may submit your paper in such a way that no identifying information about you is included. Another option is that you may request, in writing to your instructor, that your paper not be submitted to Turnitin.com. However, if you choose this option you will be required to provide documentation to substantiate that your paper is your original work and does not include any plagiarized material.

Submit a Turnitin Assignment

When you are ready to submit your Turnitin assignment,

  1. On a computer or external USB flash disk, make sure the name of the file you wish to send to your instructor contains only letters and numbers. The file name cannot have spaces or special characters except for underscores ( _ ) and only one period before the file extension (such as, termpaper1.doc)
    • Mac users: Please remember to add a three letter file extension to the end of your file's name.
    • Office 2007 users: BeachBoard cannot handle the new file formats used by Microsoft Word 2007, PowerPoint 2007, or Excel 2007. Please convert your Office 2007 files by opening them on the computer, clicking on the Office logo in the upper left corner of the page, choosing Save As, and either
      • Choose Word 97-2003 Format for Word documents, Excel 97-2003 Format for Excel documents, or PowerPoint 97-2003 Format for PowerPoint files; or
      • Choosing PDF or XPs and saving your Microsoft Office 2007 document as a PDF.
  2. Login to BeachBoard at https://beachboard.csulb.edu/ .
  3. Under My Courses, click the name of the course in which you would like to submit your assignment.
  4. Using the links on the left side of the course homepage, locate the Turnitin assignment's View/Complete link.
    • Many instructors place their Turnitin View/Complete Assignment links in the Assignments folder, which you can access by clicking the Assignments link.
    • If you cannot find the View/Complete Assignment link in the Assignments folder, click on the other course links on the left side of the course homepage.
    • If you still cannot find the View/Complete Assignment link, check your notes for any special instructions your instructor may have given you in class.
    • Finally, if all else fails, contact your instructor for assistance. You can email your instructor from inside of BeachBoard or you can contact your instructor using the contact information found in his or her syllabus.
  5. Click the Submit icon.
  6. In the submission title box, key in your assignment's title, for example "Coordination Modes in the Multisegmental Dynamics of Hula Hooping."
  7. Click the Browse button. This opens a Choose file pop-up window.
  8. Find the file on your computer you wish to submit and click the Open button. [This process is similar to the process of attaching a file to an email message.]
    • Turnitin accepts the following filetypes: Microsoft Word (.doc), WordPerfect (.wps), Adobe Acrobat (.pdf), HTML (.htm or .html), rich text (.rtf), and plain text (.txt).
  9. Click the Submit button.
  10. Turnitin will display your assignment in plain text. Review this information carefully. Once you submit the assignment, you cannot get the assignment back.
  11. When you are ready to submit your paper, click the Submit Paper button.
  12. Turnitin will display a digital receipt confirming that your assignment was successfully submitted. You may want to print a copy of this receipt by going to File > Print in your web browser, although this is optional.

Special thanks to SDSU [http://its.sdsu.edu/turnitin/] and Turnitin [http://www.turnitin.com/static/training.html] for their support.