Website Known Issues
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We hope that your time with Turnitin is without any problems, but occasionally something might happen that you were not expecting. Don't panic! We're here to help. Check out this list, and see if anything seems familiar. If your problem appears on the list, we're aware of the problem and currently looking into it.
Found something new? Get in touch with our support team by raising a request at our help center
Assignments that have anonymous marking re-enabled after the original assignment post date (feedback release date) has passed will not sync grades with the LMS grade book or Feedback Studio view when the second post date passes. Any grading added will only display in the assignment inbox view.
We are aware of a reported issue whereby instructors are unable to open Similarity Reports from the student portfolio or Gradebook view.
Our development team is at this time exploring a potential fix to address the issue
Workaround: In the meantime, instructors can continue to access Similarity Reports from the assignment inbox.
Instructors may encounter issues accessing and grading submissions on the Turnitin iOS app if they were submitted using an integrated learning management system (LMS). Despite successfully accessing submissions through integrated iOS links, instructors may encounter a situation where they are prompted to log in again. This could lead to the loss of their grading progress.
Workaround: Reinstalling the app should resolve the issue.
Some instructors and students might receive the following error message “Your Session Has Expired. The request failed because of a server error” displayed when accessing the Similarity report. We are currently investigating a resolution to this issue.
Workaround- While we investigate the cause of the error, resubmitting the document will generate a new Similarity Report which should be accessible. Students can resubmit ifit has been enabled in the assignment settings, otherwise instructors can resubmit on behalf of students. If a record is required of the original submission date and time, we recommend downloading a copy of the digital receipt before resubmission.
The Assignment Library is not displaying or importing assignments created after March 5th. We are currently investigating a resolution.
We are aware of an issue where newly created assignments within master classes are being incorrectly numbered as 0 in the assignment list. This issue will have no affect on the performance of your assignments.
When adding a QuickMark to a paper, currently, the description field is remaining blank. Instructors and Students will be unable to see any QuickMark description within a paper. Associated rubric criteria and bubble comments still remain visible.
Adjustments made to the small match exclusion threshold in the assignment settings are not reflected in the new report for submissions to that assignment. Additionally, the new report experience does not accommodate a percentage threshold for small matches at this time. You can still set a threshold by word count.
Note that when switching between the classic and new report experience, changes to filters and settings are saved in the version they are applied and do not transfer between the different versions.
Workaround: When small match exclusions are made in assignment settings, or when a percentage threshold is preferred, use the classic report to view submissions to that assignment.
When using the new Similarity Report experience, the report may fail to load if there is a very large amount of similarity data (e.g. a submission over 200 pages with several matches to different sources on each page). These reports will still load in the classic view.
Workaround: When this loading issue occurs, return to the submission inbox and open a different report that has less data to load (fewer pages and lower score percentage). When the new report loads, switch back to the classic view, then open the failed report again. This should load the report in the classic report experience.
TFS with Originality users are not currently seeing Submission Details in the new Similarity Report experience.
Workaround: Access Document Details in the classic report while we fix this bug.
When viewing the new Similarity Report experience (available for Originality Check users), the small matches setting is in the include section, implying the expected behavior when selected would be that small matches are included in the report. However, when the setting is selected and the ‘fewer than XX words’ option becomes visible, and when applied, the small matches are actually excluded. We are revisiting the language and design of this feature to address this.
Documents submitted after August 18th cannot be viewed using the Turnitin iOS app. The assignment inbox may instead display a message stating "This document is currently unavailable"
Workaround: Please access Turnitin via our website turnitin.com or turnitinuk.com.
Existing classes that our accessed via Turnitin's IOS app are occasionally displaying a message indicating that there are no active assignments.
Workaround: While we are investigating this issue, if your assignments are not appearing within the IOS app we recommend accessing your classes via our website turnitin.com or turnitinuk.com.
Instructors may intermittently receive a 503 error message when adding bubble comments or QuickMarks to submissions in Feedback Studio. This can sometimes result in the comment needing to be reapplied or rewritten. We are currently ivestigating a resolution to this issue.
If an instructor deletes a QuickMark from a submission, they may be unable to add another QuickMark to the page immediately. When a QuickMark is deleted, a message appears at the top of the submission stating "Comment has been deleted." with the option to undo the deletion. It may not be possible to add another QuickMark while this message is displayed.
Workaround: Either select "Undo" to return the deleted QuickMark to the same location or select anywhere on the page to resolve the message and continue with your grading.
The submission release setting, which is enabled in the institutional account settings, allows instructors to view the full submission of a matching paper within their institution without submitting a Paper View Request.
We have discovered a bug where the class name and date of submission for the matching paper may be inaccurate. The actual match details shown are unaffected.
We are currently investigating an issue causing distortion to voice comment replay while using certain browsers to view submissions. This issue occurs on the latest versions of Google Chrome and Microsoft Edge.
Workaround: Voice comments work as expected while using Firefox and Safari. We recommend using one of these two browsers to access Turnitin until the issue is resolved.
We are currently investigating an issue causing the Turnitin iOS app to crash intermittently upon launch on iOS 15 and iOS 16.
Within the Viewer, some users may notice duplicate comments in their rubric after assigning a bubble comment to criterion and then converting it to a QuickMark. These unintended duplicate comments cannot be deleted. We are currently investigating this issue.
Leaving comments on a QuickMark is a powerful way of giving students tailored feedback on areas where you feel like they need to improve. However, you have to know to click into the QuickMark for this comment field to appear. We’re actively investigating a better way of making it clear that this functionality is available to you.
Workaround: Interacting with the QuickMark will make the comment box visually identifiable. This can be as simple as hovering over the expanded QuickMark.
Turnitin supports a variety of quotation styles, however we've discovered that smart quotes can cause some issues when used in certain languages that makes them behave in non-standard ways.
Workaround: When excluding quotes is important, we'd recommend using a different type of quotation until this issue has been resolved.
Instructors can resend the welcome email to students, if they haven’t yet logged into their accounts. Administrators have a similar facility which enables them to resend the welcome email to instructors. A bug currently causes the recipient’s language to reset to ‘none’ when either of these tools is used, with the result that any future emails to that user will be sent in English, until they log in and change their localization preferences.
Workaround:
If possible, avoid using this tool in situations where a student may have to rely on Turnitin displaying in their primary language if it is not English. In this situation, direct your student’s towards the following pages, where they can set up their account in their chosen language.
Turnitin.comWhen logging in using Shibboleth, the language value of the account isn't passed correctly, resulting in all accounts switching to English when they attempt to log in.
Workaround: After logging in via Shibboleth, use the language switcher to move to the language you'd like to use.
When downloading files via Bulk Download, files named automatically to make it easier to tell them apart. However, are recent change altered the way file names are generated. All the information is still provided, but the order differs to how they'd usually be.
How it should be: AuthorFirstName_AuthorLastName-Filename.[extension]
Current format: ObjectID - AuthorLastName, AuthorFirstName Filename.
When late submissions are allowed in the primary assignment, these papers are still distibuted to students even when users have chosen to not allow late assignments in the PeerMark assignment. They should be excluded from the papers available to be distributed.
When a student is enrolled on a course where discussion boards are disabled, it will be disabled for them in any course they try to access.
When a large number of submissions are selected to download in an anonymous marking assignment, the bulk download may timeout before the file can be downloaded. We're actively exploring a solution to this problem.
Workaround: Selecting fewer submissions to download at anyone time should ensure that the files can be exported successfully.
When submitting to Turnitin, submissions must be 20 words or more to ensure we can successfully generate a Similarity Report. For some Chinese language submissions, this word count is erroneously being flagged as being under 20 words when more have been used. This problem exists for Chinese Traditional and Chinese Simplified submissions.
Workaround: Choosing to 'Accept any File Type' when creating an assignment will ensure that we can accept the file, a Similarity Report will be generated, and the correct word count will be shown.
Turnitin recently updated the servers that send our system emails. System email include welcome emails and digital receipts. Some email clients may experience a short period where they learn to 'trust' that the emails are sent from a legitimate IP address.
Workaround: Email administrators for your institution can manually add our IP addresses to your trusted list. For Microsoft email Exchanges, you can add the IP addresses to the IP Allow List.
Turnitin's email IP addresses
156.70.24.112
156.70.24.110
Microsoft files generated using Windows, including .doc, .docx, .xls, .xlsx, .pptx, .ppt, .ppsx, and .pps files, can occasionally fail to process when uploaded to Turnitin. Files created using other operating systems are unaffected.
Workaround: Convert your file to a PDF before attempting to upload it to Turnitin. This ensures it is in a format we can process gracefully and without any problems.
It has been discovered that if an administrator attempts to transfer the administrative account to another user, they will be unable to do so if the email address provided is capitalized. To ensure the successful transfer of the administrator account, please ensure the new email address entered is fully in lower case characters. This does not affect adding instructors or students to an account.
It has been discovered that if a student is enrolled in a class that has discussion boards disabled, they will be unable to view the discussion boards tab for other classes that may have them enabled. We are working on a resolution that will allow students to access their enabled discussion boards.
We have received reports that particularly large bulk submission downloads will produce an empty zip file as opposed to providing one containing the submissions from the assignment. We are currently investigating this issue.
Workaround: If you are experiencing issues with the bulk download feature of an assignment inbox, submission may still be downloaded individually.
Due to security restrictions, if an email address is changed within the Student Information System, it is unable to update within Turnitin’s roster sync to avoid any instances of misuse.
Workaround: If a student’s email address has changed and this needs to be reflected within Turnitin’s roster sync, please raise a ticket with our Customer Support team by emailing tiisupport@turnitin.com.
Students using the Internet Explorer 11 browser will be unable to select the resubmit button and will instead receive an error message.
Workaround: While this error appears when using Internet Explorer 11, other browsers appear to be unaffected. We would ask that students use a different browser to submit to Turnitin while this issue is investigated.
In the event a student has completed more than two peer reviews, some instances have been reported that only the first review is displayed and freezing occurs when the instructor attempts to use the navigation arrows.
Workaround: The freezing isn’t constant. A little perseverance and you should be able to access the reviews while we work on a fix for the cause of the freezing.
Some users have noticed a discrepancy between the submission count found when viewing statistics By Account, By Instructor, and By Class. We are looking at different ways of improving how we gather these statistics to improve their reliability.
Workaround: The statistics are not currently inaccurate; however, the different ways in which we look at the data depending on user choice alters how we count different statistical events. For example, if a class has multiple instructors then we may count submissions multiple times in the By Account view but once in the By Instructor view.
On a small number of papers, the similarity layer can occasionally disappear when loading a different layer. This tends to be caused by the layer not fully loading when the paper has opened.
Until a fix is applied, please be patient when loading Feedback Studio for the first time if you encounter this problem.
When there is a small character count in a submission, it can cause an e-rater to fail to process. Users may see the error 'e-rater cannot process this paper'.
If you encounter this error, please get in touch with our support team using tiisupport@turnitin.com this will help us to diagnose the problem further, and get more data on the lengths of assignments it affects.
If a student logs in, navigates to the homepage, and then hits their browser's back button, they are immediately logged out of Revision Assistant. Though students can log right back in, we know this is annoying, so our teams are working on a fix. In the meantime, students should use the navigation links provided in the Revision Assistant headers, rather than the back button on their browser, to move to and away from their homepage.
In Revision Assistant, students are only allowed to join a class from a school in their district. Currently, if a student does try to join a class outside of their district, they are not added to the class, but they also do not see the error messages we created to tell them that. Confusing students is not what Revision Assistant is all about, so we will get those messages showing up for them as soon as possible. In the meantime, teachers, please make sure your students know the class codes they need to join their classes in Revision Assistant.
Users may encounter ‘Server 500 error’ when accessing or modifying date range for usage reports. We are working on resolving this issue
On rare occasions, the mechanism to detect bibliographic material on a document does not always complete and can produce unexpected results when applying the bibliography exclusion filter.
Our product and development teams are investigating solutions to address the issue in future versions of the product.
When using Content Tracking mode in the Text-only view, some users have been unable to open the source. A error message stating 'Sorry, report is currently unavailable is shown'.
We are working on resolving this issue.
If a user’s document contains line numbers then the bibliography and abstract/method and materials exclusion feature may not work as expected.
Workaround: Where possible, do not use line numbers in the documents you submit to iThenticate.
Citations are not excluded when the bibliography section is excluded.
Workaround: If you encounter this issue, please contact our support team at: ithsupport@ithenticate.com
When you add a website URL to the Report Filters section, if the URL is no longer accessible but the content has been crawled historically by our crawler, it will still show the content match in the report.
Workaround: Exclude the match individually on the paper.
We do not support .tex files from the document preparation system, LaTex.
Workaround: Convert your files from .tex to .pdf before you submit.
When using iThenticate as an administrator, there is a limit of 15000 rows that can be displayed and downloaded as an .xlsx file in the report details list.
Workaround: Adjust the date range to tailor your results.
When using iThenticate’s Upload User List feature, users cannot upload an MS Excel .csv file that contains Japanese characters.
Workaround: If your user list contains Japanese characters, upload it as an .xls file.
There is an issue where customers moving from similarity to iTh 2.0 may face a problem of being unable to login fully to the product. Our engineers are investigating this issue.
Workaround: This can be resolved by the admin changing the user role to Principal User instead of User.
There is an issue where our service is not excluding bibliography correctly, it will exclude some of the bibliography but not all of it. We are working on resolving this issue.
Workaround: Clear formatting and removing any numbering and then resubmit
The new Similarity Report view may fail to load if there is a very large amount of similarity data (e.g. a submission over 200 pages with several matches to different sources on each page).
The Flags feature in the new Similarity Report is not displaying when opening the report from the Paper Lookup tool and the Statistics area of the administrator console. We are working on resolving this issue.
The PDF download feature for the doc-to-doc comparison report is currently unavailable. We are working on fixing this.
An issue was discovered where student submissions are self-matching between reports. This issue started on the 1st February and was resolved on the 7th March. Self-matches should now be excluded again from future similarity reports.
We have successfully regenerated submissions made between 1st Feb - 26th Feb.
Some of our users are experiencing delays with loading QuickMark sets or have missing QuickMarks from sets in Feedback Studio. This issue is now resolved.
Occasionally QuickMarks were not appearing in the PDF version of the Similarity Report when users downloaded the current view with the grading layer active. This issue is now resolved.
While grading a paper within the Turnitin Viewer, some accounts experienced issues viewing and commenting on their initial QuickMark. All accounts should now have full QuickMark functionality restored.
iThenticate supports a variety of quotation styles, however we've discovered that smart quotes can cause some issues when used in certain languages that makes them behave in non-standard ways.
When attempting to exclude Abstract and Methods from within the Similarity Report, there is currently an issue that is stopping the exclusion taking place after the option has been selected.
We have resolved this issue.
When adding a comment in Turnitin Feedback Studio, you are able to select a highlight color to make comment groupings standout at a glance. Some users had experienced these highlights not displaying as they would expect. Different browsers had presented the issue in different ways and some versions did not show it at all.
After modifying exclusion settings in the Filters and Settings panel of Similarity Report, upon applying the changes highlights will correctly be displayed.
Fixed date - July 16th 2021
Audio comments will now save to Turnitin significantly more quickly. If you've experienced a delay in comments saving in the past, you'll now notice that the process will only take a matter of a few seconds.
Fixed date - October 13th 2020
If an instructor were to include an ampersand or the word "prompt" within their inline comment on a student's paper, it would appear as the equivilant HTML entity or an open bracket. This has now been resolved and these phrases and symbols can be used as normal.
Fixed date - June 10th 2020
Some users have encountered issues while attempting to submit their paper using the Safari browser. After clicking ‘Submit’, the process will hang at the loading screen and will not complete the submission. You will know if your paper has been successfully submitted as the page will display a green success banner and show a copy of your digital receipt.
Fixed date - February 26th 2020
Students that selected a language other than English as their preference may have found that their emailed digital receipts would not contain the paper ID of their submission. We have made changes to ensure the paper ID’s are now included in all supported languages.
Fixed date - Feb 6th 2020
When a QuickMark is deleted from a paper, a message appears allowing you to undo the deletion if necessary. If this message wasn’t dismissed and a replacement QuickMark was dragged from the side panel, an incorrect QuickMark might be added to the paper.
We can now report that this has been resolved. We apologize for any inconvenience this may have caused.
Fixed date - Aug 16th 2019
In a number of cases, Feedback Studio would fail to correctly process a submission causing it to not show when trying to open the document viewer. This lead to the M14:11 error that some users were experiencing.
The M14:11 error denotes a problem with the processing of a submission when it is displayed. Investigation into this issue has been a top priority for our engineers for a number of weeks and we are happy to report that the underlying issues behind this error have now been resolved.
It is possible that the error can still show when there is a genuine problem with a submission. However, for the vast majority of users the document viewer should operate as intended.
Fixed date - Feb 22nd 2019
Users of our Turnitin Feedback Studio, WriteCheck, and iThenticate services would have experienced issues while attempting to reset their password on Tuesday 12th February 2019. In order to reset your password, we send an automated email to the address associated with your account. Unfortunately, it was reported that these were not being received. This also had an effect on new users attempting to set a password using their Getting Started emails.
We have worked on this as a priority and can now report that it has been resolved. We apologize for any disruption this may have caused.
If you still need to reset your password but are unsure how, please follow this link to learn how.
Fixed date - Feb 12th 2019