Turnitin / Canvas LTI - reports not generating

[j_avneri]

We've been experiencing an issue with the Turnitin LTI in Canvas - specifically for assignments that have the optional setting 'Generate reports on due date' enabled - similarity reports don't seem to generate on or even after the due date in Speedgrader for students who submitted prior to the due date. Instead an exclamation mark & error message 'Turnitin has not returned a score after 14 attempts to retrieve one' is displayed where the similarity report should be displayed. The reports seem to generate okay for students who submitted on the due date. We have open support tickets with Turnitin and Canvas but I was wondering if anyone else has been experiencing this issue?

[Chris_Hofer]

Hello  @j_avneri  Thank You for posting your question.  I'm not quite sure I follow what you are asking.  If the option to "Generate reports on due date (students can resubmit until due date)" is selected, and you have a due date of March 15, 2020 @ 5:00 p.m., then the report will not be generated until that time...not before.  There are two other options that you could choose instead, both of which are varieties of "Generate reports immediately" (one where students cannot resubmit, and one where resubmissions are allowed until the due date...but that reports might be delayed by 24 hours after three resubmissions).  Based on this information, I wouldn't expect a report to be generated with the settings you currently have selected.  This is confirmed in the following Guide: Optional LTI settings | Canvas LTI (look at the section on "Report generation and resubmissions").

I hope this information will be of help to you, Joseph.  Please let Community members know if you have any other questions about this...thanks!

[j_avneri]

Hi  @Chris_Hofer ‌, thank you for replying. Sorry I should have been clearer - the issue is that the reports are not generating even after the due date - the error remains (I'll edit my original post to make this clearer), although we can ask Turnitin to push these through manually. So a scenario in using your due date as a example:

1. Due date is 15 Mar 2020 @ 5pm

2. Student A submits 14 Mar 2020 @ 2pm

3. Student B submits 15 March 2020 @ 3pm

4. Similarity report for Student A is generated as expected in Gradebook and speedgrader.

5. Similarity report for Student B is not generated as expected in Gradebook / speedgrader (even on or after due date) and instead the error as described above appears.

[g_schriek]

Hi,

We have had some of these caes too - according to both Canvas support and TII support this seems to happen when the assignment has been changed in between but I am not sure if that is really the case.

It seems that at certain moments the connections simply time out and after 14 attempts is just a no.
Canvas support could help us push the scores through (if that did not work we needed to contact TII support).
I am still trying to find out what causes the time outs. We found sometimes working with more than one assign to field there seems to be more cases like this (eg student 1, 2, 3 have a different deadline than student 4,5,6 so you have more assign to fields).

I'm curious to know if there is more to this so will be following your post...

best,

Gerdien

[dhulsey]

 @g_schriek ‌, for what it is worth, I have my reports generated at the time of submission. That works fine. Are these large enrollment classes? maybe one of the serves is choking when it tries to generate a large number of reports at the same time?

[g_schriek]

Thanks so much  @dhulsey ‌ I think it has more to do with changes in the assignment. We usually let generate reports after submission as well. As far as I can see now it happens only with assignments with multiple dates and changes in dates. It seems like TII does not really loves this kind of set up so I advise now to make separate assignments instead of adding a date as a workaround. They have one assignment unpublished without TII so they can easily duplicate it and the classes are not large so they only need a minute or so to add a new assignment for a different date assigned to selected students.

[j_avneri]

Many Thanks  @g_schriek ‌ and  @dhulsey  I don't think that Turnitin LTI supports differentiated due dates so we wouldn't normally set them up with multiple 'assign to' / due dates.

I have completed some tests where I haven't changed or amended the assignment since it was first created and still resulted in the error. We've also experienced the error in courses with 50 students or so.

[dhulsey]

 @j_avneri ‌, I agree taht the LTI does not support differentiated due dates. You could create multiple assignments and use the selective release tool in Canvas though. Maybe that would work? It does clutter up the grade book though.

[eleanor_kippax]

I have been having issues with Turnitin reports also. One student has submitted the same assessment to 3 separate assignments and none of these has generated a similarity report. The 1st assignment was an old one which did have a due date and was changed to have none, the 2nd was an old assignment with a due date of July 2019, the 3rd was a completely new assignment with a due date of 30/3/2020. All assignments are set up to generate Turnitin reports immediately upon submission and none have done so. Is there currently an issue with Turnitin and the generation of reports in general? 

[g_schriek]

Hi Eleanor,

I'm not aware of any issues currently but if you suspect so, you could check TII itself via their website.

If this has happened only to this specific assignment, it could also be the file itself that is corrupted or something.

TII does not like having dates changed and no due date is also an issue I believe. I would expect the 3rd assignment to work since it is new.

If any other submission in this or other assignments do get a score, I would doublecheck the uploaded file and ask TII support if there is something wrong with it.

If you have the same issue with other submissions in this assignment or in other assignments, you can ask TII support to have a look. If they can not fix it and submissions have ended up in TII but scores have not been written back to the assignment, you could ask Canvas support to push them through.

Hope this helps!

[eleanor_kippax]

Hi Gerdien,

This is really helpful, thank you. I would also have expected the 3rd assignment to work, hence my confusion and assumption that there must be an issue or as you say, the file may be corrupted (although it is just a PDF and has uploaded without issue to Canvas). I'll contact TII and see what they say, thank you!

[DevonHackelton]

Update: TII suddenly generated reports for most (but not all) of my students' submissions 9 hours after the due date. This includes submissions where the percent match is 0%. 

I also have this problem as described by the original poster. Let me add this: the assignment is a personal narrative so I expect "percent matching" numbers to be very low. Reports for some students showed up  and those numbers are 1 - 2%. I suspect that the other essays are 0% matching which might be related to why TII via the Canvas plugin is not generating a report. 

And before anybody tries to roast me for worrying about the percent match (or even using TII for such an assignment) I'll let you know that I use TII to grade for many reasons. First, I have a huge bank of sentence-level comments I have written in the ETS grader section of TII. Second, students also write expository papers and I want them to view feedback for all their papers in the same manner, navigating to the TII information via Canvas. Third, I really like the ease of using the audio comment feature. 

[GlennaPieri]

I also have this question

[Chris_Hofer]

Hi @GlennaPieri ...

There is a button under @j_avneri's question that says, "I also have this question" which you can click on to subscribe to the topic so that you can follow along with the conversation.  Just thought I'd let you know about this nifty little feature here in the Community.  🙂