Turnitin Multiple and Anonymous Marking

Have you ever wished you could mark anonymously in Turnitin? Well now you can. 

Two new Turnitin features will be enabled from July 12 2018. Anonymous Marking and Multiple Markers will be available as options when you are creating your iLearn unit for Session 2.

What are these settings?

Multiple Markers allows for multiple teaching staff to mark Turnitin submissions. Each separate marker’s comments are visible and able to be filtered in Feedback Studio by students and teaching staff.

Anonymous Marking is just as it sounds; once enabled, teaching staff can mark Turnitin submissions with all identifying fields removed (i.e. they won’t know the identity of the student). Please note that once an assignment is submitted to Turnitin the “Anonymous Marking” option can no longer be edited, so it needs to be turned on before submissions are opened. Similarly once the post date (the date the marks get released) is reached, student names become visible and cannot revert to being anonymous, so please take care in setting these dates. Students will also need to be reminded to not put their name on the document itself (e.g. on the cover or in headers/footers), otherwise the submission will appear as anonymous but the marker will still see their name once it is opened.

There is an audit trail if for some reason (for example a very high similarity score) the marker wishes to view the name on the submission. A reason must be provided by the marker which is recorded and accessible by the convenor.

Why and when should I use these features?

Multiple Marking

Some assessments may require a number of markers, or even a second review with feedback. Some use cases would include:

• Dividing marking – when a number of markers are responsible for grading one question in the one assignment submission
• Grade reviews – a student requests another teaching staff member to review or regrade their work
• Multiple reviewers – this may be more suitable for post graduate studies where the same submission is reviewed by multiple markers

Anonymous Marking

While some institutions (like The University of Sydney) have made anonymous marking a compulsory requirement for assessments, at MQ these features will purely be an option for those who wish to use it. There are arguments for and against anonymous marking, however overall it can reduce bias and increase fairness particularly from the viewpoint of a student.

Having the option for Anonymous Marking switched on will also allow for completely random, anonymous marking across the unit.

Please note that blind double marking is not possible at this time.

See the quickguides for more on how to setup and use these new features. For further support please speak to your Faculty Learning Designer or the Learning Innovation Hub!