Your institution’s Turnitin license allows up to a specific number of active students to use the service. When this student limit is reached, the system automatically blocks new students from joining your account or submitting papers.
If your account unexpectedly reaches its student capacity, it is usually driven by one of two common scenarios outlined below.
Common causes for reaching the student limit
1. Inactive classes remain open
A student occupies a license as long as they are enrolled in at least one active (unexpired) class. If older classes are not regularly expired, past students remain active in the system and unnecessarily consume your license count.
The fix: Instructors must manually expire classes that are no longer in use.
Data request: If you are an administrator and need help identifying open classes across your institution, please submit a ticket to Turnitin Technical Support. Request a spreadsheet of all active classes created on or before a specific date. You can then distribute this list to your instructors to close out old classes.
2. Duplicate student accounts
When accessing Turnitin directly, students may create a new profile using a different email address instead of signing in to their existing profile or resetting their password. If the same student joins a class using two different profiles, both profiles will count towards the institution’s student limit.
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How instructors can reduce duplicate profiles:
- Enroll students directly: Add students to the class using their email addresses. Each student will receive a welcome email containing instructions for activating their profile.
- Make self-enrollment optional: When creating or editing a class, instructors can choose whether students are permitted to enroll themselves. You can find more information on this in our guide on Creating a class.
- Manage enrollment keys: Self-enrollment keys are case-sensitive and remain valid for 14 days. Only one key can be active at a time. Instructors can generate a new key to expire the previous one, or disable self-enrollment to expire the current key immediately. Students who have already joined the class will remain enrolled. You can find more information on this in our guide on Student self-enrollment.
- Share keys securely: Enrollment keys should only be shared with the intended students and must not be posted on a publicly accessible website.
When an instructor expires a class or removes a duplicate student, the system does not update instantly. Please allow up to 48 hours for enrollment changes to reflect in your administrator student limit count.
Next steps and additional resources
Further guidance: For detailed steps on how to view your current usage data and reduce active student counts, please see our guide on Managing your student limit
Expanding your license: If your student population has grown and you need to permanently increase your enrollment capacity, please contact your Turnitin Account Manager directly to discuss purchasing additional seat licenses.