When you activate TurnItIn for any Assignment Folder, TurnItIn will automatically check all documents submitted to that folder for text matches. If the students are filling out a worksheet or will otherwise have text in their documents taken directly from the assignment instructions, this can cause very high Originality Scores on students' submissions. To avoid this, you can provide TurnItIn a copy of the worksheet ahead of time, and instruct them to ignore the repeated text.

To have TurnItIn exclude a template from Similarity Reports, it must be uploaded in the assignment settings BEFORE any students have submitted to the folder. Templates must be less than 100MB and have at least 20 words of text. TurnItIn will accept the following file types for template uploads:

• DOC/DOCX (Microsoft Word)
• XLS/XLSX (Excel)
• PPT/PPTX (PowerPoint)
• WPD (WordPerfect)
• PS (PostScript)
• PDF (Adobe Acrobat)
• HTML
• RTF (Rich Text)
• ODT (OpenOffice)
• HWP (Hangul)
• TXT (Plain Text)

Load a Blank Worksheet for TurnItIn to Exclude

1. Go to Course Tools -> Assignments. If you have not yet done so, create a new Assignment folder.
2. Click the drop-down arrow beside the name of your Assignment folder and choose Edit.
3. Click the Evaluation & Feedback block on the right side. Scroll to the bottom, then click Manage TurnItIn.
4. Check the box labeled "Enable Similarity Report for this folder".
5. Configure any TurnItIn settings you would normally enable (e.g., decide whether to show the Originality Reports to students), then click More Options at the bottom of the screen.
6. A pop-up will appear. Under the label Exclude assignment template, click Upload Template.

7. Click Choose File and navigate to the location the file exists on your computer. Select the file and click Open.
8. Scroll down and click Submit.
9. Click Save to save your TurnItIn settings.

Once configured in this way, documents submitted to this folder will have the template text excluded from all students' Similarity Reports.