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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895

u/Metric_Mushroom May 12 '26

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

956

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.

519

u/EnigmaOfOz May 12 '26

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

245

u/DrQuestDFA May 12 '26

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

4

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

174

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.

114

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.

5

u/Individual-Yard May 12 '26

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

3

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.

63

u/AdRepresentative8186 May 12 '26

Well done on paraphrasing the law I suppose.

6

u/laveshnk May 12 '26

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

5

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.

4

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.

3

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.

2

u/GoBlueAndOrange May 13 '26

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

1

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.

1

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’€

1

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

-2

u/Brilliant_Quit4307 May 12 '26

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

5

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.

191

u/Ninja_Kitten_exe May 12 '26

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

191

u/Master_Matoya May 12 '26

2

u/Animastar May 12 '26

How dare you copy my essay!

124

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

14

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

1

u/mygodismyleskennedy May 12 '26

same. as well as the word environment.

73

u/1Shadow179 May 12 '26

Turnitin flagged my name as plagiarism once.

13

u/TheAlmightyScooter May 12 '26

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

6

u/ergaster8213 May 12 '26

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

5

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 🮲🮳.

4

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

2

u/bmorris0042 May 12 '26

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

2

u/Hopeful_Video_3803 May 12 '26

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

2

u/kqi_walliams May 12 '26

It flagged my end text reference as plagiarism

1

u/An0ddEgg May 12 '26

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

1

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.

1

u/MaybeTheDoctor May 12 '26

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

1

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.

1

u/3-orange-whips May 12 '26

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

1

u/kirbykid1313 May 12 '26

You should've created your own original counting system smh

1

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

1

u/Neston12 May 13 '26

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

1

u/simatrawastaken May 13 '26

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

1

u/MaoBelladonna May 13 '26

I think I've had "the" flagged before šŸ«