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Region formatting tips for Handwritten Assignments

In the Questions step, you'll be digitally adding the regions or areas of the assignment where the student name, questions, and student responses will appear so that they can be detected by paper to digital's technology. This step of digitizing the assignment assists with the assigning and grading process later on.

What are regions?

A region is where you define an area on the assignment template for P2D to look for student identification information as well as the questions and student responses. These specified areas allow Turnitin to assist with automatically matching submissions to students and to detect questions for grading. For example, as you're grading a question and the students responses from their submissions, the document viewer will automatically zoom to the regions you designated in the Questions step. The Regions can be drawn directly on the assignment or added from the Questions Editor side panel. It’s generally helpful to create regions that are slightly larger than the actual area you expect students to use.

Name and ID regions

The name and ID regions are for specifying where students write in their name and ID on the assignment (the same as it is recorded in the course roster). Creating a name region is necessary for later steps that assign names to submissions. While having the ID region is optional, providing both a name and ID region can help increase the number of students that are automatically matched to submissions. 

Region tips

Whenever possible, include both a student name region and student ID region on the assignment as two separate fields, horizontally positioned

Don’t vertically position these regions, i.e. place the name region on top of the ID region or vice versa.

Recommended Name and ID region sizes:

Screenshot 2024-02-08 at 12.26.01 PM.png

Not recommended Name and ID region sizes:

Screenshot 2023-12-14 at 1.49.10 PM.png

Students’ names and IDs should be handwritten (not typed) and exactly match the names and IDs as they are recorded in the course roster

The student ID is optional to include. If you want to include the student ID, check your course roster and make sure that each student has a student ID.

Create one region area to include the whole name and another region area to include the whole ID

Don’t create a region for every single character of the student’s name or every single number of the student's ID.

For the name region, don’t create separate lines for a student’s first name and last name

Have students write their name on the assignment as it is recorded in the course roster. This will optimize the Manage Submissions step where submissions can be automatically assigned to students.

Question regions 

The question regions are for specifying each question and student response area on the assignment.  You can create new questions and subquestions by clicking and dragging on the PDF or adding them from the Questions Editor side panel.

Position each question region so that it does not overlap with the question before it or after it 

Each question region must be clearly defined in order for Turnitin to correctly group questions in subsequent steps.

Include both the text of the question and the desired answer area in the region

The benefit of doing this is that, when grading the responses, you will be able to see the question text for full context.

Try to use just one answer region or area per question

Increasing the number of answer areas (lines or boxes where students write their answers) can result in many permutations of answer groups. This makes reviewing these groups more difficult. It is usually better to separate complex questions out into subquestions on the outline instead.

Make the question regions slightly larger than the actual area you expect students to use

This ensures that Turnitin's AI can accurately detect all of a student's handwriting. For example, a letter “g” that partially falls below the region area will be read by our AI as the letter “a”. See the screenshots below for an example of recommended region sizing.

Recommended question region size:

Screenshot 2024-02-08 at 12.26.17 PM.png

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