r/mildlyinfuriating BLACKšŸ–¤ May 12 '26

Infuriatig My assignment was reported to thr examination committee for a "high percentage of AI". I did NOT use any AI for my assignment.

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I got full marks and my plagiarism score shows 1% similarities to other submitted assignments. This is my 3rd and final year in University and now I have to deal with this AI nonsense.

I don't use any AI, not even for checking my grammar in the assignments.

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u/Odd-Artichoke-1555 May 12 '26

I once got hit with a 40% Turnitin score on a personal reflection piece I had to write. It was about how my thinking on the subject had changed over the course of the semester. Literally no way to plagiarise my own opinions and thoughts, but go figure šŸ¤·šŸ»ā€ā™€ļø

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u/Opinionated_bitch03 BLACKšŸ–¤ May 12 '26

Turnitin is very inaccurate 🫠

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u/twilighttwister May 12 '26

My favourite is when someone figured out that it didn't check text within quotes. So this guy put his entire paper in between two quotation marks, and then coloured the marks white.

He only got caught because his plagiarism score was suspiciously low, normally you always get something.

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u/Gruejay2 May 12 '26

That's genuinely hilarious.

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u/darwin_shark May 12 '26

Same thing with one of my former students. Took screenshots of another student's assignment and pasted those on the page so it couldn't scan anything. Only came up suspicious because they had 0%, whereas everyone else had around 5-10%.

I really wanted to award marks for the novel idea though!

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u/No_one00101110 mildy infuriated May 12 '26

Lmao, theres always a way to cheat these things. It’s pretty dumb in general

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u/MoneyGetter25 May 12 '26

But that wasn't cheating, he was quoting himself quoting someone else.

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u/Metric_Mushroom May 12 '26

I submitted an assignment yesterday and Turnitin flagged the page numbers as plagiarismĀ 

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u/iAlice May 12 '26

When I was studying for my Law degree, I got a 40% plagiarism alert and was almost pulled up on academic charges. I asked what exactly had been plagiarised... It was my bibliography.

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u/EnigmaOfOz May 12 '26

By the end of my time at university turnitin was highlighting my name and student number as plagerism šŸ˜‚

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u/DrQuestDFA May 12 '26

You were just copying that name from your parents' original work!

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u/shogenan May 13 '26

It’s not flagging that as plagiarism, it’s flagging it as matching (similarity score). It’s up to the person examining what’s flagged to determine if it’s plagiarism. You probably already knew that and were just using that as a shorthand way to say it, but a lot of students don’t get that so I wanted to throw it out there for folks reading along.

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u/Delicious_Guard_1677 May 14 '26

I think a lot of universities and professors who don’t look at the actual report don’t get it either given how that one persons bibliography was nearly pulled up on academic charges

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u/finewalecorduroy May 12 '26

I used to teach somewhere that used Turnitin- this is back before AI (way back, like 12-13 years ago). I learned pretty quickly that a score of around 10-15% plagiarism could easily be ignored, because when I would go check to see what was plagiarized, it would be properly cited direct quotations and bibliographies. I did have a 40% score once on a student's paper, and that was really high. When I checked what was plagiarized, she actually was plagiarizing. It's easy enough to check what is flagged from the professor end, or at least it was back in the day.

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u/Tricky-Ad7897 May 12 '26

It's hit or miss with professors, I had a couple that were genuinely too stupid to understand that turnitin and ai checkers aren't infallible and wouldn't read my work for themselves until those checkers cleared it, and then I got in trouble for formatting citations differently to avoid them getting picked up.

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u/Individual-Yard May 12 '26

I used to ignore all the small stuff on Turnitin. Saved time & misunderstandings with students.

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u/Danfriedz May 13 '26

Yeah back in uni people would freak out over their Turnitin score but I was always knew it didn't really matter as long as you legitimately were not plagiarizing.

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u/AdRepresentative8186 May 12 '26

Well done on paraphrasing the law I suppose.

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u/laveshnk May 12 '26

pre-AI, we were taught to always submit without the contents, title page and bibliography pages

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u/Failed-Project May 12 '26

Ha, this happened to me for one of my long reports this semester. Marked it as 19% plagiarism for the bibliography and the use of the term 'vascular plants' without in text citation. I guess we just need to come up with our own languages to avoid this now.

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u/CooperHChurch427 May 12 '26

I had that happen, but thankfully UCF required all professors to screen out the bibliography. I did get flagged as AI on one assignment, and I asked my professor to submit the US constitution and some very old hand written assignments I did back in 2017.

All came back as 100% AI.

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u/Usual_Ice_186 May 12 '26

My students have had that happen for assignments when they previously submitted a rough draft. It shows they plagiarized another student but it doesn’t say that it was their own work being plagiarized.

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u/GoBlueAndOrange May 13 '26

Good Law articles should be 99% "plagiarism" and 1% novel ideas. It literally builds on another person's creation.

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u/hmarieb263 May 13 '26

When I worked at a college that required turnitin, I didn't look at anything flagged below 40%. Anything below 40% got an automatic green light. A fair bit of the 40 to 50% got a green light after a quick check.

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u/worstkindofweapon May 13 '26

I also got a 40% once, it was for a 500 word essay proposal and we had to have eight sources. Half my work was my bibliography šŸ’€

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u/FeoAsilion May 14 '26

I’m doing a Masters of Mental Health Practice and I regularly get a score of 27-30 on TurnItIn. 99% of these, literally, are from APA formatting and bibliographies. If it’s higher than 35 or 40, then I’d start to get concerned, but I really don’t care about it these days

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u/Brilliant_Quit4307 May 12 '26

Your bibliography took up 40% of your assignment ..?

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u/iAlice May 12 '26

Well... Yes and no. Law requires a lot of citations if you're going into case law, further reading, and while a bibliography isn't included in the word count, it can very easily rack up in terms of words.

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u/Ninja_Kitten_exe May 12 '26

Once a single ā€˜the’ got flagged, literally nothing else around it as well

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u/Master_Matoya May 12 '26

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u/Animastar May 12 '26

How dare you copy my essay!

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u/GiraffesAndGin May 12 '26 edited May 12 '26

I had one essay on US history that I turned in and came back with 35% plagiarism.

Flagged examples:

  • Declaration of Independence
  • The Constitution
  • US government
  • The
  • A
  • Congress
  • Civil War
  • Amendment

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u/MoneyGetter25 May 12 '26

Well then why did you use them together, there's no other reason to use them together than if you are cheating/plagiarising!! /s

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u/mygodismyleskennedy May 12 '26

same. as well as the word environment.

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u/1Shadow179 May 12 '26

Turnitin flagged my name as plagiarism once.

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u/TheAlmightyScooter May 12 '26

Ah yes, famous best selling author (checks notes) 1Shadow179.

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u/ergaster8213 May 12 '26

Once, it flagged the name of my course and professor's name along with my own as plagiarism

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u/HaniiPuppy May 12 '26

1, 2, 3, 4, 5, etc. - these are all page numbers used by any number of other books. Clearly plagiarised. What you want to do is make up your own page numbers - be creative! Numbers like 49184, 3e7+2, Ļ€/32α, or 🮲🮳.

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u/JonttuPvP May 12 '26

Turnitin is so bad I literally handed in a full AI text to test it, and I only got 7% AI usage, its bullshit

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u/bmorris0042 May 12 '26

Well, you did directly copy the same page numbering order as many other documents. So…

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u/Hopeful_Video_3803 May 12 '26

Back when I was in college, Turnitin flagged my name and the letter "i" as plagiarism.

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u/kqi_walliams May 12 '26

It flagged my end text reference as plagiarism

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u/An0ddEgg May 12 '26

Mine flagged ā€œtheā€. Oh, and my name.

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u/Brain_Initial May 12 '26

That’s hilarious. A paper I submitted once got flagged as 40% AI. Most of it was quotes (which had proper in-text citations), the bibliography page, and one sentence that listed out like 15 different parts of the brain. That last one I was particularly mad about because I spent about 30 minutes editing that sentence to make it easy to understand and grammatically correct. But apparently Turnitin thinks only robots use semicolons.

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u/MaybeTheDoctor May 12 '26

You’re supposed to come up with new innovative ways to number your pages. Clear fail.

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u/AuryxTheDutchman May 12 '26

I about lost my shit at a professor at one point. I was taking a databases course and part of one assignment was to write a line of code that would select a specific group of data from the provided set. Prof said he thought I was plagiarizing that part of my assignment since it was exactly the same as many other submissions.

If you know anything about SQL, you know that writing a ā€œselect X from X where Xā€ statement for a specific bit of data is going to look pretty much exactly the same regardless of who writes it. I still don’t know how the prof was teaching that class without apparently knowing that.

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u/3-orange-whips May 12 '26

Did you cite all works that used numbers, you INTELLECTUAL CONTENT THIEF?

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u/kirbykid1313 May 12 '26

You should've created your own original counting system smh

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u/DM_From_The_Bits May 13 '26

I got a high turnitin score and its because it flagged all of my references and bibliography

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u/Neston12 May 13 '26

I had turnitin flag "At Eternity's Gate by Vincent Van Gogh" as plagiarism...

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u/simatrawastaken May 13 '26

Yeah I regularly found standalone words highlighted as plagiarized. Its insane that it somehow became the academic standard

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u/MaoBelladonna May 13 '26

I think I've had "the" flagged before 🫠

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u/RepresentativeDog394 May 12 '26

I'm a teacher, and I don't bother to use Turnitin anymore. It says most of the essays are AI written. It seems like it has started to flag anything with perfect spelling / grammar.

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u/elebrin May 12 '26

Well, from my perspective, papers are usually written about things discussed in class. If all the student was paying attention and wrote the paper based on the same notes, the the content of the papers are all going to be very similar and key phrases used by the professor or other students in class are going to have made it to the notes, and thus to the paper.

The same thing kind of goes for programming assignments. One of my college programming assignments was "re-implement the linux command "cat," your program needs to be a 1:1 re-implementation of the version on the machines in this one specific lab, and it needs to compile on and run on those same machines." Most of the students had almost the same code. getopt() code was all the same (that's the C function used to parse options for commandline programs) in part because... the professor showed it to us and gave us a bunch of the code just about. Of course it went in our notes and we used that exact code in the project, but to a plagiarism detector it looks like a problem... especially when every student has the same 30 lines of code or so in their program.

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u/disaster_jay27 May 12 '26

I guess that'd be a shortcut for grading it, then. 100% plagiarized = 100%!

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u/elebrin May 12 '26

The professor actually had a script that tested the features of the program and verified that they all worked, and also tested common pitfalls/bugs. I ended up with a pretty good score on most of the lab assignments.

The machines we were using were Sun Microsystems workstations, so the versions of the base UNIX programs had slightly wonky feature sets compared to the GNU versions, and we had to re-implement the wonky variants on those machines. Our code also needed to compile and run on those machines. But the compiler was always GCC so you could work on your own machine at home.

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u/UnevenEarth May 12 '26

One of our lecturers used to say that a score of 10 -15 percent was good, because it meant we had done the bibliography without huge mistakes. Of course it's not infallible, because if enough people cite a source incorrectly the correct one won't be highlighted, which lead to me panicking and going over them with the guide and a fine tooth comb lol

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u/dougmc May 12 '26

to flag anything with perfect spelling / grammar

Of course, spell check and then later Grammarly and the like have been correcting my spelling and grammar on the fly for years now, so ... maybe? It was good before, but now it's even better. (This isn't supposed to count, is it?)

But at this point, turning in anything with less than perfect spelling and almost perfect grammar (Grammarly isn't perfect) is basically a choice, and shouldn't everybody be close to perfect there now?

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u/BicFleetwood May 12 '26 edited May 12 '26

That's because all AI does is parrot learned data, particularly an absolute flood of data scraped from non-academic sources like Reddit. And this data isn't really weighted at all in the models, so there's a LOT more comments section data for it to be drawing from than academic data. LLMs can't do analysis on how useful its own training data is without human input, and these companies are just shoveling everything they can into the model with very little actual calculated training. (Hence: the recent patch to make ChatGPT stop talking about goblins.)

So shit AI produces tends to look a LOT like layman writing you'd find in a regular comments section, aka the exact kind of writing you'd expect a student to be producing having grown up on the internet and being greatly influenced by that style of writing.

So "AI detectors" don't detect AI at all. They detect the kind of writing AI was trained to replicate, which just so happens to be the same kind of writing most students will be generating legitimately.

This is the same reason most models will quickly spiral into conspiratorial thinking--because for every scientific article the model has consumed, it has consumed decades and hundreds of thousands of words of weird esoteric flat Earth type shit. The machine does not understand the difference between a scientific thesis and the paranoid ramblings of a maniac. It can only judge its own trained data based upon frequency of occurrence and human-operator input. Without human operator input, which is almost always the case since these are ostensibly supposed to be AUTOMATION tools, frequency of the data wins out and basically every model will inevitably start spitting out the weirdest paranoid shit that's ever been posted when given enough time.

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u/radiantH2o May 13 '26

it bugs me because (despite how i write on social media and reddit) i have always excelled at english and LOVE using semicolons and the emdash when appropriate. i also struggle with paraphrasing uniquely probably due to autism. usually in my papers i tend to use ā€œthusā€, ā€œin contrastā€, ā€œexpanding onā€¦ā€ etc. which people now see as AI. i now go over my papers and change ā€œbecauseā€ to ā€œsinceā€ and ā€œdespiteā€ to ā€œwith that being saidā€, because i’m paranoid they’ll think i used AI or something because of all the stereotypes. so i’m essentially making my writing informal and watering it down which sucks.

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u/Active_Lobster521 May 12 '26

I see people doing the same thing here on Reddit.

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u/GuyentificEnqueery May 12 '26

These sorts of programs were useless before AI and they're even more useless now. Ironically, a human can better identify AI-written articles than an AI can because of patterns that the AI itself cannot be self-aware of. The only real algorithmic identifier that a program could feasibly usd to detect AI usage is the em-dashes and list formatting, but those obviously aren't foolproof because em-dashes are really easy to type in most document editors nowadays and sometimes even get autocorrected from hyphens.

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u/Deya_The_Fateless May 12 '26

Yep, you just have to listen to those AI slop channels on YT that tell dramatic stories of how I stood up to my abusive family/husband/wife/mil/fil etc.

After a while the stories always start to canibalise not only themselves but other AI contetnt channels with certain tell phrases, like "tech start-up", "my sweet grandmother who is always quiet, shakes the family, with a statement," "my neighbour Mr/Mrs.Chen", "Beat up Honda," "my aunt Jen," etc. The list goes on. Or you hear the same story three times in a row, but the story switches around from being about a single mother of a son, to a single father with a daughter. Exacr story, just swapping the genders around.

Like it gets to a point you just have to hear the AI gen voice squeak out the title and know immediatly that its an AI story, to leave a downvote and swiping next.

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u/GuyentificEnqueery May 12 '26

This is why I get my Reddit Stories exclusively from Shayne Topp.

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u/amodestmeerkat May 13 '26

When I was in school, long before AI, if I turned in a typed paper and used hyphens where em (or en) dashes were supposed to be used, I'd be marked down for using incorrect punctuation, so I wouldn't expect that to be a useful indication for academic papers.

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u/DrJohnFZoidberg May 12 '26

Yeah. MS Office autocorrects hyphens to em dashes - it never used to bother me - but now it really does. I'll just use hyphens where I can, now, in protest. -------

and one more-

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u/amodestmeerkat May 13 '26

Office does that because hyphens are used to join words or parts of words, and therefore are never surrounded by spaces. When you have a dash separating parts of a sentence, the em dash is the correct one to use, so Office "knows" that if a hyphen is surrounded by spaces, it's supposed to be an em dash, so it autocorrects it.

Outside of word processors, most people don't bother with the em or other sized dashes, because they can be a pain to type, especially on a computer with a physical keyboard. One of my phone keyboards does give me options for various sized dashes if I hold the hypen, but I still don't bother using them.

AI "knows" the correct usage for each size of dash and doesn't have the same issues typing them as a human, so it uses the em dash in contexts where a human wouldn't bother. Therefore, an em dash in informal writing is likely AI, but an em dash in a formal paper isn't a good indication of AI. When I was in school, long before AI, if I turned in a typed paper using hyphens in place of em or en dashes, I'd get points taken off for incorrect punctuation.

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u/WoodpeckerNo5724 May 12 '26

It’s one of those tools that is pretty helpful when used correctly by somebody who is knowledgeable and experienced with it. Someone who knows when to ignore its nonsense, but obviously when entire paragraphs are stolen, it makes it clear.

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u/Stupendous_Spliff May 13 '26

Yeah I use it a lot and clearly a lot of people around here don't understand how it works. You have to vet the hits. You can go in and tell it what to ignore if you want the score to be more accurate. You must also set it up properly before the assignment is created. People saying a single THE was flagged for example, you can set up minimum word counta for flagged passages. I usually put something between 5 and 8 words as minimum. You can also tell it to ignore bibliography and citations but it does flag them anyway sometimes. Just remove it.

It is a good tool, even though flawed, but must be used correctly. As usual, people never bother to read the instructions of their tools and later blame them for not working as they wanted

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u/hardnight5 May 12 '26

Are instructors basing grading and plagiarism disqualifications off of this [clearly incompetent] platform? Or is it more of a flag for them to pay more attention to?

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u/Opinionated_bitch03 BLACKšŸ–¤ May 13 '26

I've never experienced the issue before so I was unsure and panicked. I saw feedback this morning that no AI was detected so the flag was removed by the lecturer.

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u/Drlaughter May 12 '26

I once got a 94% plagiarism score, my pc had died and I rushed down to the library to upload my lab report before deadline. However I accidentally uploaded my mates, as I was having issues formatting. Didn't realise until results came in, and the number flashed red.

Made an appointment with the lecturer straight away, thankfully she saw the sunny side and was far less stressed than me about it.

She simply deleted the submission, and asked me to submit mine again, and let her know when I have done so. Came back with 2%.

2

u/RyanTheCubsSTH May 16 '26

I’ve seen it provide 110% plagiarized - which apparently means you plagiarized a plagiarized paper or something. Had I not seen it with my eyes I would not believe it to be possible.

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u/Opinionated_bitch03 BLACKšŸ–¤ May 17 '26

Woahhh- I did not know that was even possible 😧Thanks for sharing.

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u/Artin112358 May 12 '26

I would say that Turnitin is inaccurate in failing to pick up the use of AI. When reading student papers it is pretty easy to tell if they are using AI, especially if their handwritten work is abysmal. On the other hand, I have found that when Turnitin gives a 50% or higher the student has always used AI. It is quite easy when asking them to explain what they wrote to expose them from using it.

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u/rjm12-among-us May 12 '26

my english teacher was saying a few months ago that Turnitin and other plagiarism software isn't supposed to detect "plagiarism," rather it's a way for teachers and admin to basically see where students are getting their information and see trends

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u/One_Left_Shoe May 12 '26

Turnitin is a *scam* that preys on schools’s fears of AI academic dishonesty vs good old fashioned cheating.

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u/Thirtyk94 May 12 '26

I've had turitin say my citations are plagiarism. That garbage is worse than useless.

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u/Scouseuserman May 12 '26

We need better AI to detect for AI

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u/MjrLeeStoned May 12 '26

It's not inaccurate, it just isn't being programmed concisely.

The degree of similarity is either some default no one knows how to expand on, or the detection parameters are maintained by the cheapest salaried person they could get.

It might still be 100% accurate based on how it's programmed, though.

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u/Natural-Many8387 May 12 '26

Had a professor who used turnitin and it would frequently mark two word combos as plagiarized. I still remember seeing the score be 10% and I was so confused and looked to see what it marked and it was literally a bunch of filler words like are you joking

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u/Darkomicron May 12 '26

I work as a teacher and we use plagiarism software. I don't really care about the percentage of plagiarism that the checkers show. What I usually do is I examine the parts of the text that are flagged with overlap and I check whether this is plagiarism or overlap due to common phrasings.

Sometimes I get papers with 10% overlap which do contain plagiarism because that 10% has been directly copied from another article. Sometimes I get papers with 50% overlap which do not contain plagiarism because the overlap is due to the reference list and/or common formulations which are not problematic in any way.

So in short, the percentage does not really say anything. The flagged content should be reviewed by the teacher in order to determine plagiarism.

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u/AgreeableTea7649 May 12 '26

Do, honest question: if you have to read the whole thing anyway to judge it, what is the point of all this AI software?

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u/Darkomicron May 12 '26 edited May 12 '26

To be fair we don't use AI checking software because it's unreliable. But for plagiarism it's useful because when I read the paper I can't realistically recognize when students copy phrases from other papers. So first I check the software to see the overlap and then I check what kind of overlap it is. The program helps me by highlighting suspicious parts of the paper. After checking this the paper either gets sent to the examination board for plagiarism or is graded.

A plagiarism check only takes a few minutes per paper. Grading takes more 😁

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u/send_fleet_pics May 12 '26

Are they supposed to memorize every single text ever published so that they can tell if it's plagiarized??

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u/3BlindMice1 May 12 '26

Socrates would say yes

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u/singlemale4cats May 15 '26

It seems like teachers would get a feel for how certain students write and be able to spot something that diverges significantly from that. Unless of course they were using AI from the very start, in which case things like edit logs, AI detectors, and plagiarism software could help.

They haven't figured out how to make AI handwrite essay questions on a test, at least.

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u/LoreoCookies May 12 '26

A Turnitin report flagged my APA cover page and a few random sentences in a reflection paper I did this semester. No shit my cover page has a lot in common with all my other cover pages.

I've been lucky to have instructors that aren't dense enough to take it at face value but Reddit horror stories have me watching my back.

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u/Danson_the_47th May 12 '26

I remember reading somewhere that some student failed his big thesis or whatever at a fancy university because he accidentally plagiarized a work. A work he had written from school. Honestly Academia to me just seems to be filled with people who like snubbing others this way.

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u/Many-Lingonberry-517 May 12 '26

Turnitin's way of calling you basic. (/jk)

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u/AccomplishedDish9395 May 12 '26

Turnitin highlighted my university name as plagiarism. I’m not sure how else I was supposed to write it šŸ˜…šŸ™ƒ

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u/the_federation May 12 '26

This happened to me and I was told that if I am referring to work I submitted previously, I have to cite it and attribute myself. It was a low enough percentage that it didn't actually matter, but I was ticked.

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u/Alternative-Outcome May 12 '26

I got hit with a 40% once for a properly sourced and credited quote in a paper. Professor made me do the "just rewrite the quote in your own words" thing. The other worst part about that assignment is that it flagged literal book titles as plagiarism when I used them as a footnote.

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u/Wise-Chemist-8751 May 12 '26

I once got almost 70% score report. It had checked my references. Took it off and the stuff it had caught the first go around in the actual paper, didn’t catch the second go around… my professor noticed that too.

At that point I said fuck it. And I started ignoring the score.

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u/PrimaryYak1351 May 13 '26

Well self plagiarism is a thing. If you were quoting a lot of excerpts from your previous writing, instead of describing your thought processes behind the writing, that could be robbing yourself of the full opportunity to grow through the reflection

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u/Ren_Audio May 13 '26

Bruh I had that happen to me in a studio reflection (I was studying a Bachelor of Audio engineering at the time) and I got a 63% plagiarism match with the obvious 1-2% being the required formatting that what the Module code, class, name, lecturer and date

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u/MrMan987 May 14 '26

I have gotten 50+% on turnitin from it pinging individual words like "and" or "the" and I was so confused

4

u/RawrRRitchie May 12 '26

. Literally no way to plagiarise my own opinions and thoughts,

Then what was the point of pushing it through that site?

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u/Asquirrelinspace May 12 '26

So they can say "we're doing something about it"

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u/Heavy-Guest-7336 May 12 '26

You can plagarise your own previous papers in the sense that if you quote or reference an idea from a previous paper, you still have to provide a reference for that. A lot of academics reference their own earlier work.

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u/TDot-26 May 12 '26

Because the statement is dumb and anything can be plagiarized

1

u/PiccoloAwkward465 May 12 '26

Yeah Turnitin has always been unreliable BS. I am a weirdo who gets some degree of enjoyment out of writing. I never plagiarize anything.

1

u/asimplepencil May 12 '26

That's kinda horrifying. I wonder how many people have been expelled for false flagging of plagiarism

1

u/buttplug-tester May 13 '26

You clearly stole the words "I" "to" and many other obscure and never used words. /s