Turnitin: Grading using SpeedGrader 

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Last post, we talked about the new Turnitin Clarity features, what Clarity is, and how to use it. Even if you use Turnitin (either the standard assignment type or Clarity), you can still use Canvas’s SpeedGrader and rubrics for grading. SpeedGrader will still give you access to all of Turnitin’s reports and information about the submission – you just need to know where to look.  

When you open a Turnitin assignment, you’ll see this kind of table with submission information. Students name their submissions, and you can see that title directly under the student’s name. You can also see the submission date and time information, then there’s the “Grade” column (which you can just ignore – that’s for grading within Turnitin, but we’ll be using SpeedGrader for grading!).  

The next few columns are the whole reason why you’re using Turnitin – there, you’ll see the Similarity percentage, the AI writing percentage, and any Clarity-specific flags from Turnitin. You can click on each of those bubbles for a specific submisison to open the Turnitin Writing Report and get more information, or you can wait and view that exact same information inside SpeedGrader.  

Once you’re ready to grade, click the SpeedGrader button at the top right of the page.  

At the top of the SpeedGrader doc viewer, you have the same labels to view different parts of the Turnitin report. The information for those displays in a panel you can slide out from the right side of the doc viewer (click the arrow button at the top right of the document), and you can click through the different categories to see the info in the panel.  

The information displayed in that panel is a good overview – but to get full use of the Turnitin features, click the “Go to Writing Report” button at the top left of the doc viewer.  

This new Writing Report view shows you a preview of the student’s work, a panel on the right to view the different elements of the report, and a timeline at the bottom where you can watch a timelapse of the student writing their submission – with observations noted on the timeline with numbers. 

In the first Writing Report category, Turnitin notes anything that it identifies as a potential red flag. For this submission, Turnitin flagged that there was minimal revision and a reliance on pasted text. Remember that these are pieces of information for you to use and evaluate to make your decisions – they’re not a guarantee that something wrong happened.  

To get more information about these flags, you can click the “Observations” tab in the Writing Report or the numbers on the timeline. The Observations section of the report provides more overall information about the submission (word count, total writing time, and writing sessions) before jumping into giving details about things that it’s flagged.  

Here, you can see that Turnitin has noted a few sections of pasted text and that the pasted text was not changed at all. It was not able to identify a source for the pasted text in this example, and it was only able to use its AI detection on the second flagged chunk of pasted words. The first section was not run through its AI detection because there wasn’t enough text in the chunk – an individual section must be at least 300 words for Turnitin to check for AI writing.  

The final section of the Writing Report is for AI Chat Activity – and this is where you’ll see a student’s entire conversation in the AI chat if you have that setting turned on. If you have the AI chat setting turned off or if the student did not use the chat, you’ll see a “No AI chat activity for this submission” message under that tab.  

You can jump back and forth from the Turnitin Writing Report and your normal SpeedGrader doc viewer at any time throughout your grading process – just use the “Go to Reports and Feedback” button at the top of the screen to jump back to your normal SpeedGrader view. That normal SpeedGrader view is where you’ll see your Canvas rubric, enter your grades, and add any annotations you want to the submission.  

Resources 

• Turnitin Similarity Report guide 
• Turnitin AI Writing Report guide 
• Turnitin Writing Report guide 

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