Tii News: June 2016

09/06/16: Processed paper formatting issues – effects: Windows 10 and Word 2013

Due to a student help enquiry, we have become aware of an issue affecting the presentation of fonts in student papers as presented in the Turnitin document viewer. This issue will not effect all documents, or indeed all fonts, but the common denominator it is that the original student documents were created on computers running Windows 10 and using Word 2013. As this a very common operating system and Word 2013 is the current version that the majority of students will be using there is potential for this to affect a number of submissions. Turnitin have acknowledged this issue and their engineers are currently working to resolve it, but their action will not resolve the formatting issues in papers that have already been submitted and may currently be in the process of being marked.

Notes for Markers – What to look out for in the document viewer

In order to ensure that you are viewing an accurate version of the paper we ask that you pay particular attention to:

• the reference section of the paper specifically, if the issue has occurred then italicisation will be uniformly absent.
• formatting issues that have a pattern, e.g. font size irregularities throughout a paper.

In these cases, then you can obtain the originally submitted document from the within the Turnitin document viewer for the purpose of comparison. To obtain the originally submitted document, look at the bottom-left hand side of the document viewer and locate the button with a picture of a printer on it. Click on it and select the option: Download submitted file, as shown in the screenshot included below.

Student also have a responsibility to check the paper that they have submitted for assessment. Please remind your students of the importance of doing this for any future submissions and in the event of any issues students need to contact the service desk (X4444 or servicedesk(at)brighton.ac.uk) who can establish a help ticket logging the issue with submission and that help was sought.

*56% of studentcentral users over the past month. Word 2013 is the version of Word provided to all students while they study with us (more information available at the IS website: https://staff.brighton.ac.uk/is/computing/Pages/Available%20software/Students-office.aspx).

Update on visibility of studentcentral Grade Centre column at time of post date – originally reported via staff email lists on 23/05/16

Turnitin have confirmed that the column visibility issue is resolved.

What does this mean?
At the point of the post date the Grade Centre column associated with the Turnitin submission point will become visible to students as expected. This is particularly important for schools where My Grades is used for the delivery of unratified marks to students.

If you would like to know more about the student experience in My Grades and how the Grade Centre controls the view of unratified marks, please check out the following help page at the IS website: https://staff.brighton.ac.uk/is/learningandteaching/Pages/studentcentral/Managing-the-Distribution-of-Grades-and-Feedback-on-studentcentral.aspx

I also wish to highlight our student facing materials in relation to Turnitin and My Grades which are available at LibGuides and as a tab in each school’s subject guide: http://libguides.brighton.ac.uk/esubmission