Turnitin truncating papers?

[armstrongsubero]

Hmmm it looks like you are loading your paper in some program that changes the character encoding of the original word document. The Turnitin platform probably does not support this new encoding properly which causes it to look like that.

Did you upload your paper to another plagarism or grammar checker? Or copy and paste to some box then to something else? You using msWord? Or an alternative?

[a2jc4life]

I do use LibreOffice, not Word, but the file is saved in .doc format and other than the one file that SafeAssign cut off that one time (at the bottom of a very full page) I've never had a problem before. (I've been uploading them this way for school for 3 years now, at schools with a couple different plagiarism checkers.) I'm not using the bibliography builder feature. I do some copying-and-pasting, but anything I paste is pasted in as "unformatted text" and I put the formatting back in manually. I don't use grammarly or any other outside tools to check grammar or check for plagiarism.

Turnitin's help has submission numbers for both papers now, so hopefully they'll figure out what's going on! (At least when the formatting is WEIRD the instructor can tell it's a glitch. As opposed to when a reference mysteriously goes missing!)

[a2jc4life]

In the ongoing saga of Turnitin flakiness.  The next paper did the same thing, and apparently the grader is not savvy enough to recognize that is not how I formatted the paper.  (Not sure if I should roll my eyes or laugh.)


Turnitin is investigating.  In the meantime, SL suggested (I wrote them to give them a heads-up, in case mine aren't the only papers it's doing this to) that I submit PDFs.

[a2jc4life]

Well, Turnitin was unhelpful, to say the least. This is their response (after I'd sent a screenshot of the last page of the original document):

"Never say never, so I cannot say that is 100% not possible.
But to be completely honest, that's very unlikely that our system or Moodle's made edits to the original paper."

[armstrongsubero]

I agree with Turnitin folks though, it is unlikely that their platform is at fault, it's something messing up the encoding of the characters.

[a2jc4life]

If my paper has all the content in it (which it does), and after uploading it to Turnitin parts are missing or warped (which they are), then their platform IS doing it, regardless of whether it's ultimately a problem in Turnitin or in the file's encoding. The content was there before Turnitin processed it and not there after Turnitin processed it. If there's an incompatibility problem, that's still important to know, because I uploaded a file type they say they accept.

[bjcheung77]

Just wondering, do you use Outlook.com email or Gmail? Could you do a little test and upload that to your Onedrive for Outlook.com or if you're using Gmail, upload it to Google Docs, can you see the full contents there? If you can, then the Turnitin application or website is having issues. If you can't view it in either Onedrive or Google Docs, then it's the file corruption.

[greencouch]

I consistently have problems with Turnitin and large file sizes, especially PowerPoints. So now when I submit to Turnitin, I also upload my projects to a Dropbox or Hightail site, and then provide the download link to the instructor when I submit my assignment.

[a2jc4life]

Turns out my LibreOffice documents, when saved as .doc files, have the full content properly viewable in LibreOffice (duh) or in MS Word in the previewer or after converting to .docx (weird) but not when simply opened in MS Word. If I save the same file in the same program as a .docx, however, it displays appropriately on the other platforms.

So the Moodle instructions need to say "upload a .doc or .docx file created in MS Word, or a .pdf." (And meanwhile, LibreOffice needs to fix their compatibility, because that's just ODD. I can completely understand losing formatting, but losing actual content, that's formatted exactly the same as content elsewhere in the document that remains intact...that's very bizarre.)

[armstrongsubero]

Told you its a character encoding problem. Its actually not bizzare because depending on the character encoding used on the documents on the different software platforms it will produce a different result. Dont quote me on this but to make it simple the characters that represent a 'Space' in one app (open office) could represent some obscure character in word depite have the sane file format. Turnitin in uses the same encoding as word hence your problem.
I have character encoding problems pop up all the times when I'm writing a driver for a new LCD module particularly on 8 and 16 bit micros. With the newer 32 bit ones I dont have the problem as much.