We've had a very small handful of these for the last couple of years (maybe up to 5 per semester), but this last semester the number has rocketed. On last count we'd had about 50 cases this semester (out of around 4500 total submissions). We can't find any pattern, most students affected are using normal Office 2013 on Windows, a few have used Office 365, I'm not aware of any using Open Office or Office for Mac. We can't reproduce it, and Turnitin support have been no help diagnosing it.
One surprising thing we have discovered is that you don't need to download as pdf and reupload, you can actually download originally submitted file and reupload and it will work. This suggests to me that it's not to do with the file, but maybe an issue in the original processing of the submission.
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