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There is a known bug in the integration with Blackboard’s Grade Centre (studentcentral) and Turnitin, where a student’s submission does not show in the Grade Centre but has been submitted successfully by the student in Turnitin.
This is a rare occurrence but something you’ll need to be aware of and watch out for if you access and co-ordinate online assessment through the Grade Centre.
It occurs when there’s an interruption in the web service call made between the Blackboard server (studentcentral) and the Turnitin server when the student submits the work.
The student may receive an error message saying the submission was successfully received but the web service call failed. The outcome is that the submission does not show in the Grade Centre on studentcentral.
The latest occurrence of this problem was fixed on the 29th January 2014; submissions made after this date should not be affected and not all that were made before this date were affected.
Workaround Options:
- Access the submitted papers from Turnitin’s Assignment Inbox instead – in the usual way, ie, via the Control Panel > Course Tools > Turnitin Assignments
- Note that, on the Assignment Inbox page, you can re-order the list, eg, to have the list in alpha order (by last name), click the column heading ‘Author’ (see next picture)
- Or, if the due date has not yet passed, and the student reports seeing the ‘web service call failed’ error message, ask the student to re-submit the paper (providing you allowed resubmissions when setting up the submission point)
- Or, download the original submission, delete the original, then resubmit it on the student’s behalf if the due date has passed**
- Or, on the Assignment Inbox page, click the Edit assignment tab then, without making any changes, click Submit; this should trigger the web services call to successfully resend the data to the Grade Centre
- if submissions still do not show in the Grade Centre, ask your LTA to request Turnitin resends the data manually; your LTA will need to know the ID of the study area (eg ABC123_SEM1_2013) and the name of the submission point
CAUTION – marks which have already been added to the Grade Centre manually will be over-written during the resend process and will have to be entered again.
**You may also want to download the digital receipt showing the original submission date and time for the student as a record to show that the paper was submitted on time.
