Turnitin (LTI) (Ultra)

Turnitin Workflow

This workflow supports online submissions by an individual student via a Turnitin submission point. These should not be confused with a Blackboard submission point with Turnitin similarity checking enabled. This is one option for submissions by individual students where anonymity is required.  

How to use this workflow

Click on the links to navigate to a section of the guidance. Within each set of
instructions, you’ll be able to navigate to the next or previous steps or return to the timeline. Each section is marked with the member of staff for whom the guidance is most relevant, but this may vary on a local level.

Some key considerations before you begin include: 

  • This workflow only allows for online marking. Offline marking with Turnitin is not viable. 
  • Turnitin submission points are not linked to eVision for marks and penalties extraction. This will mean you need a separate system for recording lates and penalties and they will need to be manually entered into SITS at marks extraction. 
  • Grades from Turnitin submission points will only appear in Blackboard’s Gradebook in some circumstances (read below for guidance). 
  • It is not recommended that Turnitin submission points are used for PowerPoint submissions or any other submissions where large volumes of images or graphics are used. They are prone to cause issues with accessing submissions and are unlikely to produce similarity or AI reports owing to lower word counts. 
  • You should review the Allowed file types and sizes in Turnitin’s guidance pages. Whilst PowerPoints are included in this list, we would still recommend against using Turnitin submission points for this file type. 

What options does this workflow offer?

This workflow also offers the following options:

  • Turnitin similarity and AI writing reports
  • Distributed marking
  • Anonymous marking*


Info: *Using Turnitin for anonymous submissions provides a trust-based system. Student names can be associated with submissions inside Blackboard even while their details are obscured in Turnitin’s interface. The expectation that markers do not access this material during the marking process should be set. This adheres to the University policy on trust-based anonymous marking.

Need further support? If none of the workflows provided can be adapted to meet current or reformed local practices and you would like further support developing workflows that meet your needs, please contact the Ultra Project team via blackboard-ultra@bristol.ac.uk including the unit code of the course/s affected (if specific) and the limitations you have met. Please note: we may not be able to meet complex assessment requirements during wave 1.