There are specific requirements with respect to the education expenses that are used to claim the credit. One of those requirements is that you have to have paid the expenses in 2016 in order to claim these expenses on the 2016 return.
However, the school will report information about your tuition in one of two ways. Box 1 reports the amount of tuition that the school actually received to pay for your classes. Since box 1 only reports payments the school has received, it wont include spring 2017 tuition payments because you havent paid them.
Box 2 reports the amounts that the school billed for the classes that you took in 2016 as well as the courses for the 2017 spring semester.
So it depends on which box they completed. If they complete box 1, this would be the amount of tuition that was paid so no additional clarification is necessary to identify your tuition expenses for the credit.
If they complete box 2, it will represent the total amounts billed so Turbo Tax will ask you for clarification regarding what amount of tuition you actually paid in 2016.
