Seven tips on how to tackle your student count on your Turnitin account
If you are a Feedback Studio and Originality Check administrator, then this is for you!
With us already being halfway through the year and yet another term at its end, we are sure you have the hang of things on your account. By now your students have also got into the swing of things and submitted easily, while instructors graded without any hassles. It all comes together as a celebration of learning with academic integrity.
To keep things smooth sailing, we would like to share seven tips to maintain an accurate student count, as shared by our partners over at Turnitin. Here goes:
- Compare your limit with your student count
While this might seem obvious, but it is important to note what your student limit is and how close you are to reaching it. Enrolment numbers take 24 hours to reflect – and can have a significant impact if you have not stayed on top of this.
- Out with the old – in with the new
It is extremely important to remember to expire out-of-date classes. Check that instructors have remembered to do this. Why? Unexpired classes count students from the previous term as ‘active.’ Active students are included in your student limit. This is avoidable by allowing classes to expire.
So, it is important to make sure that inactive students do not count as part of your student limit. Here is how an instructor can expire a class. Simply edit the dated class and change its end date to a previous date (that has passed).
- Merge is the word for multiple accounts
Ask students to merge duplicate user profiles. This happens if a student has enrolled multiple times in one class and then submitted papers through more than one user account.
How can students merge their accounts? They must contact Turnitin Customer Support and process the request. The student must prove that they are indeed the owner assigned to multiple accounts. As soon as these accounts have been merged, the process cannot be reversed.
- Let go of duplicate students
By dropping duplicate students, instructors delete multiple enrolments in classes. It is important to note that this should ONLY be done when the secondary account has not been used for submission. Dropping a student will make any papers they have previously submitted unavailable.
- Change is key – change your enrolment key
Instructors who prefer that students join their classes with a class ID and enrolment key, should always change the enrolment key as soon as all the students have set up their user profiles in Turnitin. In this manner, you prevent any duplicate enrolments.
- Stay up to date with student details
When a student struggles to access their account, either by forgetting their email address or username for example, the instructor should use the student roster to confirm the email address and name used for enrolment. If the email address listed is no longer in use, the instructor can update it for the student.
- Your account manager is your go-to
It is important to note that your student count issues could purely be due to the student limit for your institution being too low. If this is the case, the solution would be to have a discussion with your account manager to see how your count could be brought back to stability.
This blog was originally published by Turnitin: https://www.turnitin.com/blog/seven-practical-solutions-for-quickly-reducing-your-student-count
