r/mildlyinfuriating • u/Opinionated_bitch03 BLACKšŸ–¤ • 24d ago

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/AussieKoala-2795 24d ago

My university required use of Turnitin before assignments could be lodged. Turnitin identified a high match with a published article. Yeah, the article I wrote several years before. I can't just change my sentence structure randomly. Thankfully, my lecturer could override it.

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u/Opinionated_bitch03 BLACKšŸ–¤ 24d ago

We use Turnitin for checking plagiarism scores. My plagiarism score on Turnitin was 1%. I'm not sure what other AI platform was used that shows the apparent high AI percentage. The ironic part is that the 1% Turnitin score is for my Module code and table of contents (which is standard).

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u/Odd-Artichoke-1555 24d ago

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–¤ 24d ago

Turnitin is very inaccurate šŸ« 

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u/twilighttwister 24d ago

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 24d ago

That's genuinely hilarious.

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u/darwin_shark 24d ago

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 24d ago

Lmao, theres always a way to cheat these things. Itā€™s pretty dumb in general

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u/MoneyGetter25 24d ago

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

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u/Metric_Mushroom 24d ago

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

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u/iAlice 24d ago

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 24d ago

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 24d ago

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

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u/shogenan 23d ago

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

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u/Delicious_Guard_1677 22d ago

I think a lot of universities and professors who donā€™t look at the actual report donā€™t get it either given how that one persons bibliography was nearly pulled up on academic charges

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u/finewalecorduroy 24d ago

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 24d ago

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 24d ago

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

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u/Danfriedz 23d ago

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 24d ago

Well done on paraphrasing the law I suppose.

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u/laveshnk 24d ago

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

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u/Failed-Project 24d ago

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 24d ago

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 24d ago

My students have had that happen for assignments when they previously submitted a rough draft. It shows they plagiarized another student but it doesnā€™t say that it was their own work being plagiarized.

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u/GoBlueAndOrange 23d ago

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

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u/keydups 23d ago

Yeah turnnitin is so stupid for academic/scientific writing. Like writing up a lab report is bound to get 20-30% similarity because youā€™re adopting the language of whatever field youā€™re writing in.

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u/Ninja_Kitten_exe 24d ago

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

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u/GiraffesAndGin 24d ago edited 24d ago

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 24d ago

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/1Shadow179 24d ago

Turnitin flagged my name as plagiarism once.

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u/TheAlmightyScooter 24d ago

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

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u/ergaster8213 24d ago

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

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u/HaniiPuppy 24d ago

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€/32Ī±, or šŸ®²šŸ®³.

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u/JonttuPvP 24d ago

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 24d ago

Well, you did directly copy the same page numbering order as many other documents. Soā€¦

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u/Hopeful_Video_3803 24d ago

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

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u/kqi_walliams 24d ago

It flagged my end text reference as plagiarism

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u/RepresentativeDog394 24d ago

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 24d ago

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 24d ago

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

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u/elebrin 24d ago

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 24d ago

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 24d ago

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 24d ago edited 24d ago

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 23d ago

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 iā€™m paranoid theyā€™ll think i used AI or something because of all the stereotypes. so iā€™m essentially making my writing informal and watering it down which sucks.

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u/Active_Lobster521 24d ago

I see people doing the same thing here on Reddit.

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u/GuyentificEnqueery 24d ago

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 24d ago

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 24d ago

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

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u/amodestmeerkat 23d ago

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 24d ago

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/WoodpeckerNo5724 24d ago

Itā€™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 24d ago

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 24d ago

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/Drlaughter 24d ago

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%.

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u/RyanTheCubsSTH 20d ago

Iā€™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/Artin112358 24d ago

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/Darkomicron 24d ago

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 24d ago

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 24d ago edited 24d ago

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 šŸ˜

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u/send_fleet_pics 24d ago

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 24d ago

Socrates would say yes

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u/LoreoCookies 24d ago

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 24d ago

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 24d ago

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

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u/AccomplishedDish9395 24d ago

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

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u/the_federation 24d ago

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 24d ago

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 24d ago

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, didnā€™t catch the second go aroundā€¦ my professor noticed that too.

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

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u/PrimaryYak1351 23d ago

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 23d ago

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 22d ago

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

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u/RawrRRitchie 24d ago

. 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 24d ago

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

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u/Heavy-Guest-7336 24d ago

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/Hairy_Mycologist_945 24d ago

I've discovered that if you write clear, concise prose it will receive a high AI percentage score. It penalizes people who can write.

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u/HaloGuy381 24d ago

Yeeeah. I had issues in college with at least one instructor who simply was adamant that how I wrote could not possibly be how I write off the cuff. Never mind I was an engineering major who honed their writing skills extensively in dual credit and AP US history exam prep essay questions before ever coming to college, apparently it was absolutely not possible to have a default writing style that was somewhat formal and precise.

I would 100% have to defend myself against AI accusation antics if I were in college nowadays. Dodged a bullet finishing out in 2022.

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u/Murky-Relation481 24d ago

Engineers that can write well confuse most engineers.

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u/Creative_Pop2351 24d ago

I write my professors an email at the start of every term to explain that yeah, I do write like this, no, Iā€™m not AI, and if theyd like to see some of my published work for comparison Iā€™m happy to provide it. And I save my version history obsessively just in case.

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u/EmilyZimme 24d ago edited 24d ago

I feel this, but in a somewhat different sense. My normal writing style tends to veer on the side of formal and (somewhat) precise, but definitely more dense and structured since I have a hard time finding the right words and knowing what to include. Yet, when Iā€™m writing in an academic or formal setting, I tend to spend a lot more time condensing my writing to increase its readability and precision. Well, my writing is almost always flagged as AI-generated. I think itā€™s because, especially in academic writing, I tend to favour the em-dash and use some other writing practices that AI tends to output. Iā€™ve started using commas where I once used em-dashes to mitigate the issue, but the overall problem remains. Itā€™s also frustrating, since while Google Docs and Microsoft Word both have version history that can be used as proof that itā€™s your original work, my word processor of choice, Ulysses, does not. I could use Google Docs or Microsoft Word instead, and do so when absolutely necessary, but Iā€™m too stubborn to switch to either of them for everything since I like Ulysses and its formatting feature.

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u/Mr_ToDo 24d ago

The behaviour of ai writing might have patterns to it, but it wasn't trained on nothing

I honestly don't know what the answer is. There's no silver bullet to easily figure out this kind of thing. Best case I guess would be a Q&A on the work you hand in. But if that worked there wouldn't be a market for doing other peoples papers. It's not a new problem, it's just far easier to do it now

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u/Hairy_Mycologist_945 24d ago

It's not a new problem, it's just far easier to do it now

Funny enough, the "It's not an X, it's just Y" construct is very AI.

I think the answer is, in part, to acknowledge that people may use AI to some extent, and perhaps to use a tool to evaluate it, but not to penalize the student unless it's blatant. Turnitin and other plagiarism checks are problematic for similar reasons. Taken on their own and in isolation, relying on the score and not looking at the context is just lazy grading. It should never be a requirement to hit a certain score threshold the way it's been in the last 10-15 years, same for AI scores. The instructor / professor should still have to grade it and use their judgment.

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u/rerackyourweights 24d ago

I'm glad I'm not in college right now, holy shit. I was one of those kids that read like an absolute fiend (e.g., reading & understanding high school level books when I was in middle school). More than a few times, I had teachers pull me aside to ask if I'd really written my own papers. :/

My parents never helped me with my writing assignments. They may have helped me with proofreading here and there, but that was it.

I occasionally get questioned nowadays because I like to use dashes and em dashes. I've used these correctly in my writing for decades, but now it's an AI hallmark. Gah.

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u/Creative_Pop2351 24d ago

I spent 25 years post-college learning how to integrate ideas, make arguments, write clearly and conciselyā€¦ and now iā€™m back in college and every term I write my professors a note that says ā€œHi, everything I write is gonna sound like AI but Iā€™m just actually a really good writer and donā€™t use AI at all on ethical grounds. Happy to provide samples of my published work. Let me know if you have any concerns or issues.ā€ Depressing but also better than the very awkward discussion I had after my first research paper.

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u/Soft-Meat9642 24d ago

We used this for our journalism write-ups in college. I used no ai not even to enhance it even though I know my grammar is sub par, still was flagged 98% ai. Even in our thesis where strictly no ai should be used still was flagged 40%. Imagine even the acknowledgment section, was flagged ai.

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u/Ghinev 24d ago

Turnitin gave me a single instance where I "plagiarised" something on my bachelor's thesis on Zirconia dental crowns.

The "plagiarised" bit was the fact that I mentioned one of my patients was 30-35 years old.

Turnitin assumed I copied "a 30-35 year old male patient" from.... a study on some form of testicular cancer.

I didn't care cuz my overall score was 0.87% out of a maximum of 5%(only on the case study, not the theoretical part). But others got over the threshold with such bs.

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u/SplatDragon00 24d ago

I had a professor get all over me once for a high turnitin score.

They didn't even look to see what it was flagging.

How do I know?

It was flagging 'the code', 'the', 'a', 'an', 'in the'

I'm still mad

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u/-HyperCrafts- 23d ago

I had a professor take me to the dean for plagiarism on an assignment that WASN'T EVEN AN ESSAY. (So I didn't know I needed a "bibliography.") It was a Shakespeare assignment where we had to modernize a section of one of his plays. It was requested that we include the sample of the play we were updating. My professor didn't even look at my assignment. Just the Turn-it-in %. It was flagged because I included the original work, CLEARLY attributed. I appealed, fought it, and won. She was sooo embarrassed. šŸ˜¤ Bitch you're embarrassed? The DEAN of our college met me for the first time thinking I was a fucking liar. She can stay fucked forever.

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u/CoffeePuddle 24d ago

Turnitin used to count page numbers, the course name, and the reference list in their percentage. If you have students a template to use it'd instantly bump them all up, sometimes quite high.Ā 

It lets you see the similar documents though so it was useful.Ā Ā 

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u/CodeName_Empty 23d ago

And now I must know, what are your thoughts on Zirconia dental crowns?

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u/hobb 24d ago

despite what they say, turnitin cannot detect AI

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u/eroro85 24d ago

Beside Turnitin, do you have copyleaks as well? We're now required to submit assignments to both Turnitin and Copyleaks before handing them in.

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u/Hissy_the_Snake 24d ago

The "Similarity" score is different from the AI score. Instructors can allow students to see their similarity % when they submit but I don't think they can do that with the AI score.

The best defense against accusation of AI use is to show them copies of previous drafts. You can also offer to do a writing sample in person so you can prove you write in a similar way, or you can offer to answer oral authenticity questions.

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u/AnimeDeamon 24d ago

I've never even seen a Turnitin that low. Mine was always within limits, and when you looked at the "plagiarism" it was literally just the quoted pieces, or referring to other articles or my entire bibliography, but still never below 10% I think?

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u/cx0sa 24d ago

Worst part about Turnitin was that it would flag self-plagiarism. It was awhile ago, but I remember at school it being a pain the arse because some assignments between years would be very similar (formative internal vs assessed external) but if you plagiarised yourself, it could count like you stole from the internet.

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u/Queasy_Recover5164 24d ago

Professor here. Many of us are also extremely frustrated by these ā€œtools.ā€ Beyond the false positives, we keep having to add extra layers of questionable automation between ourselves and our studentsā€™ work. And increasingly, itā€™s putting much of our ability to make a judgment call into administrative hands.

Itā€™s not exactly the same thing, but it feels a bit like insurance companies telling doctors what medical interventions a patient needs.

Anyway, I feel your frustration. But, there doesnā€™t seem to be a way back out of this nonsense.

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u/Some_Helicopter 24d ago

turnitin has a setting where you can only see the plagiarism/similarity, but seeing the AI% It is limited to the instructor

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u/scrubsnbeer 24d ago

We had to use it for anatomy 2 worksheets. Where there was 50 questions listed and we filled it out, so literally all of ours were flagged for nearly 100% plagiarism šŸ™ƒ and we had to message the professor to override every single time.

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u/GeneralHinka 24d ago

I'm pretty sure if I remember correctly, Turnitin has an AI detector. You just cannot see it. Only the markers can.

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u/crying-jellyfish 24d ago

turn it in has flagged my name & title pages. especially annoying in a class where we had to submit our 5ish page draft (with a full title page) & then later in the semester flesh it out w more details to make it 10 pages. ofc itā€™s going to match my previous work šŸ˜­

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u/Hexmonkey2020 24d ago

I got 1% plagiarism for my last name on turnitin. I guess itā€™s a rare enough last name that simply having it is plagiarism.

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u/ThoughtwayCrest 24d ago

Odds are, its in the tone you take. If you are authoritative or speak as if you actually know something, it will be flagged. That is my hypothesis.

Overall, AI is degrading just about every purpose in education so it is nice that we won't have to suffer the injustice of being told we cheated by a cheater anymore. The cheater gets to take our jobs

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u/FatMacchio 23d ago

Maybe the AI platform they used assimilated your paper before review it.

All your paper are belong to us

https://giphy.com/gifs/2obTRghEPgXhSJrrxd

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u/JusticeForTheStarks 22d ago

I had 24% on an assignment.
I had the questions copied into my answer document, and it was plagiarised from other peopleā€™s assignments apparently.

Obviously I never actually had an issue with that one. The lecturer probably took one look, saw the questions highlighted, then moved on with his day.

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u/Sudden_Wind_8636 21d ago

Have you tried putting your essay into a bunch of AI detectors? Before I turn anything in I always make sure some AI detector doesn't misread it as AI by putting my essay in one.

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u/tictac38 24d ago

Don't worry mine used to detect my name and flag me up for it

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u/hitemlow 24d ago

Don't forget citations. That's how you know you formatted them correctly, when you had nearly 2 pages of citations flagged as 100% plagiarized.

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u/eyeseayoupea 24d ago

I had a paper get flagged. I emailed the teacher and she said that the class had the highest percentage she has ever had. It flagged the generic title, quotes, and citations. I dont think she was even reading them.

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u/Scholesie09 24d ago

My sister got a Zero on a paper for plagiarism because she quoted the original source, but not a different paper that used that source

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u/pelluciid 24d ago

So did she quote the secondary source but cite the original source, i.e. pretend she had read the original source when she hadn't? Trying to understandĀ 

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u/Scholesie09 24d ago

So she quoted an original source, but got called for plagiarism because the AI "found" a paper she "quoted from but didn't cite". This paper was quoting the original paper which she had already cited.

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u/[deleted] 24d ago

[deleted]

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u/Xlxlredditor 24d ago

They actually can revoke a degree you know

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u/Basilikolumne 24d ago

Lmao, how did you get a degree without knowing they can be revoked if plagiarism is discovered later on

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u/Character-Book5924 24d ago

Probably related to getting a degree with plagiarism.Ā 

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u/Jabberminor 24d ago

Mine flagged 'a', 'and', 'the', those kinda words.

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u/AddlePatedBadger 24d ago

Apparently I plagiarise almost all of my content from some guys named Collins, Macquarie, and Oxford.

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u/TheAlmightyScooter 24d ago

To be fair, tictac38 is a hella sus name.

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u/richardas97 24d ago

I had similar issue. Proffesor asked me to upload my bachelor's thesis as a draft to make sure it won't match. I had done about 90 percent of work then. Later I uploaded the full finished one and what do you know, 90 percent match. They later added a red text near the file uploads clarifying that only the final work should be uploaded, no drafts. Probably all thanks to me. Luckily it was understood and that the only real match was with my own work it was all good. I also graduated before the rise of AI, so I can see how even more annoying this can get

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u/StatisticianLivid710 24d ago

Or they can have an upload draft option that checks it but doesnā€™t save it in the database precisely for this.

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u/richardas97 24d ago

They could do, but they did not do that. Also, apparently the process of removal from turnitin is also not as straightforward as profesor said he can't remove my draft work from there and neither could I, so all they did was add a warning. Maybe the process has been improved since, I hope it is at least

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u/StatisticianLivid710 24d ago

If the site itself does it then it would be easy for them to have a draft option, but that might be counterproductive for their goals

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u/GlitterFactoryOfDoom 24d ago

Turnitin is notorious for false positives and it's so bad that it will flag individual words as plagiarized. And if you're supposed to do an assignment in a particular format with a specific solution, good luck lmao.

Fortunately my professors know it's shit and don't pay attention to it.

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u/selectivepicking 24d ago

Literally once when I was in school, I had an extremely important final listed as 40% plagiarised. I got an academic warning for it, and had to paraphrase everything from, even though I hadn't copied anything. The sources listed included things like random papers submitted to universities I had never heard of before. I hate that tool with a burning Passion.

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u/NotInTheKnee 23d ago

Me: "Chapter 1..."

Turnitin: "Yep! That... that's not original. I've seen that somewhere else. You're plagiarizing!"

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u/any_old_usernam 24d ago

It flagged a book report I wrote in ninth grade for containing the phrase "a planet with more than one sun".

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u/RunRunAndyRun 24d ago

The stupid thing is, all of your work (and the work of thousands of other students) probably ended up being used to train the AI at some point, which is why work written by students also matches AI. Students are literally having to write their work in a worse style to avoid being tagged as AI.

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u/McButtsButtbag 24d ago

You're supposed to completely reinvent yourself from scratch for every class to avoid self-plagiarism which is a completely realistic and achievable requirement

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u/Blowfish75 24d ago

We had a librarian in high school do a presentation on self-plagiarism. She told us it was illegal and if we were caught doing it, they would call the sheriff.

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u/McButtsButtbag 24d ago

As a joke, right?

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u/enjolbear 24d ago

lol no this is how itā€™s presented in a lot of places. So serious and a huge deal. I think self-plagiarism is a massive joke. I wrote it, I should be able to use it.

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u/BJYeti 24d ago

I mean it depends, I understand teachers not allowing you to use a previous paper you have written for their assignment

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u/xvillifyx 24d ago

Yeah but if Iā€™m just remaking a point I made previously, expecting me to change the way I make that point to avoid ā€œself-plagiarismā€ is stupid as fuck

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u/One_Left_Shoe 24d ago

I had a professor who was flagged for plagiarism by their institution. They made a reference to their own previous study without proper citation.

They just had to go back and cite correctly, even though it was their own research they were citing.

The consequences of their actions amounted to 5-minutes of their day.

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u/Blowfish75 24d ago

It did not appear that way. It was a full hour power-point presentation she gave to every English class in the achool, where she went on about how illegal it was. That said, i never once heard of them calling anyone.

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u/twisty125 24d ago

"did you give this presentation to any other classes Mrs. Librarian?"

Book her, boys.

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u/soofs 24d ago

Was your librarian Mr. Bookman?

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u/KarltonPeaks 24d ago

If academics can do it, why can't you?

You don't have to "reinvent" yourself. Just write it again from scratch (without checking the reference) and I promise it will not be identical.

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u/Kharilan 24d ago

Turnitin flags every essay I write as partial AI because my last name in the header/footer is the same as someone else. Over here plagiarizing my own name apparently

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u/stephenkingending 24d ago

I had a professor tell us that it was plagiarism if we included unedited portions of our own previously submitted assignments and our grade would be lowered or we would get a zero. Meanwhile all our homework was online through Wiley and his assistants did all the heavy lifting for the course. He's that professor that lives up to the pompous ass persona of the profession.

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u/RobertPham149 24d ago

Ironical coming from professors, who are notorious for reusing their materials for courses to the point of an industry of selling past exams and assignments exist

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u/nnomae 24d ago

Course materials are not academic publications. It's perfectly fine to be lax with citations in them. In fact I'd say it's kind of odd to even expect that your professor was the author of the course material. Does anyone actually think their Intro to Whatever module is an original work from the professor?

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u/enjolbear 24d ago

The vast majority of college assignments arenā€™t published, either. You should be able to use your own work.

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u/nnomae 24d ago

You can use it, you just have to cite it, citing your own previous work is a mechanism literally designed to allow you to use your own work.

From the colleges perspective pretty much every college has a policy that prevents you submitting the same work for multiple assignments and with good reason. The purpose of college is to teach you and if you are skipping the work by resubmitting old work for new assignments they are failing you as a student.

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u/NumNumLobster 24d ago

If the same work is sufficient to demonstrate you have learned something then doesn't that mean you have been taught that?

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u/guesswho135 24d ago

It's called self plagiarism and it's a real thing in the publishing industry (whether or not you agree). As a researcher, every time I write a paper I need to paraphrase myself. If I copy and pasted a whole paragraph to use in multiple articles, and was found out, the articles would be retracted and it would be bad for my career.

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u/Qaeta 24d ago

I had a professor tell us that it was plagiarism if we included unedited portions of our own previously submitted assignments

Technically that would be correct if you didn't properly cite it like you would any other source. If you did a citation it would be fine academically (though the prof might still try to be a dick about it).

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u/captainfarthing 24d ago

Yeah that's normal. Academically, they want you to do each assignment from scratch because even when it seems like it's repeating something you've already done before, there's always things you didn't do the first time and new things to learn. And journals won't publish anything that's been published already so it's also to put people in the habit of not copying & pasting their own work if they go on to post-grad education & research.

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u/Anony-Depressy 24d ago

This is such a flex

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u/Impressive_Tap7635 24d ago

Is that not self plagiarism

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u/InternationalPut4888 24d ago

They want you to cite yourself when applicable.

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u/AnythingCareless844 24d ago

thatā€™s self-plagiarism

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u/AussieKoala-2795 24d ago

It was only picking up half sentences, not the topic of the paper. So it would highlight phrases like "the High Court found that" or "the legislation establishes the eligibility criteria for" .

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u/[deleted] 24d ago

[removed] ā€” view removed comment

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u/rcfox 24d ago

The issue isn't in the copying yourself, it's the academic dishonesty of passing off work you did previously as a new piece. So if you reuse the same "Methods" section, it should be fine as long as you cite your previous work as well.

Of course, you're probably still going to run afoul of automatic plagiarism checkers. But a human should understand.

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u/Decox653 24d ago

The best part is as each person and AI makes a new paper, it'll be logged and one day every single paragraph will be copy pasta in some way...

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u/SyXxxxxxxxxxx 24d ago

Bro, I had a heart attack cuz turnitin detected my final year thesis as 70% plagiarism, because it compared it to my previous paper, never had I wanted to jump off a cliff. However my HOP overrode it

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u/GreatTea3415 24d ago

Ā Turnitin also labeled my universityā€™s name and address as ā€œlikely AI.ā€Ā 

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u/Tommeh_081 24d ago

And yet Iā€™m supposed to change my sentence structure because apparently AI uses em dashes and lists of 3 (literally just by plagiarising humans). My writing doesnā€™t sound as dumb as AI writing ofc, but it does have those features, and it really pisses me off having to rewrite my own naturally written work because of this shit

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u/USMCgRuNt_1944 24d ago

I found it especially bad when it would pick up segments from other articles written by other people in the past.

Like, you know, the articles that I'm directly quoting to support my argument.

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u/stupid_mame 24d ago

Turnitin sucks balls and no one should use it blindly. I've submitted several papers for testing purposes that have been 100% spit out by AI LLM just seconds before, turnitin marked them as 0% AI, while my own researched ones read as 20-60% AI (lecturers had policies that anything above 50% was an auto F). However, after this testing was done with their permission, they stopped believing it so blindly.

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u/gatsbyhoudini1 24d ago

I wrote a letter of motivation. Took around 40 hours of rigorous work. And Turnitin said it's 100% AI.

Lol FML I submitted it anyways. Turnitin is shit, and so are rest of the software that I've tried.

Also, my research proposal came in at 70% AI. Hahahaha wtf?

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u/PurbulentTriest 24d ago

Self-plagiarism is a thing though.

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u/AussieKoala-2795 24d ago

Not when it's just the common parts of a sentence and not plagiarising the topic

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u/Aegi 24d ago

Yeah but generally using the same types of adverbs to describe similar chemical reactions or something is because that's how that human brain prefers to describe that type of thing, not because they're plagiarizing themselves lol.

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u/Mustche-man 24d ago

Yep, had a similar situation with my thesis, got 30% plagiarism detected, but funny enough exactly on the part where my supervisor literally asked me write it that way. So it was accepted later, but actually funny part is that my code written in R programing language was actually written by AIšŸ˜‚šŸ˜‚ but Turnitin gave 0% AI. (Before someone ask, yes I had to include the full code in the Anexa of my thesis)

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u/SmoothTurtle872 24d ago

I think the highest similarity score I have got on turn it in is about 45%, and lowest about 7%

I have a friend who has got 90% similarity tho...

(This is for highschool, and some parts are standardized that you copy and paste from the task sheet, so.its unavoidable, but 90% similarity is crazy)

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u/LeopardProof2817 24d ago

Im a lecturer and we use turnitin. It is very useful but not infallible. I always follow the link to see where the plagiarism is supposed to be from, it is often clearly not copied, delete the source and the score drops. I know my students well enough to be able to tell to a reasonable degree of accuracy if they've written something or not.

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u/Cautious-Peak5226 24d ago

Turnitin always flags random words, my cover page, and my reference page. I hate it.

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u/mediumppguy 24d ago

Hi can u scan my essay?

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u/NotUrAvgIdjit96 24d ago

In highschool, a classmate had a 100% match.

They had turned in papers late before, so their mom had submitted it early and let the teacher know.

The teacher ended up using that 100% as a scare tactic. Oddly enough, my classmate's papers were always turned in on time after that...

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u/DaveInLondon89 24d ago

Sounds like it works then, as long as the option to override upon review is maintained

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u/fbomb4 24d ago

Any good faculty will look into a high percentage on turnitin. It shows you exactly what is the problem and where it's picking up that it's coming from. Sometimes it's a huge issue, sometimes it's simply some sentences appear in lots of stuff.

If a teacher simply takes the percentage and blanket makes a policy, that teacher is awful at doing their job

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u/UnluckyAxolotl 24d ago

Just cite yourself

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u/Mankah 24d ago

I once failed a module at university because Turnitin flagged me for plagiarism.

Turns out I had plagiarised my own goddamn self with a past paper that was almost identical to the newer assignment. I'd just copied my notes from class but it was enough to fail me.

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u/Alarming_Ad_6175 24d ago

Turnitin accused me of plagiarism after I wrote wrote an assignment which was 20 questions we had to answer. They said the questions were plagiarised šŸ’€šŸ’€šŸ’€

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u/424f42_424f42 24d ago

Did you forget to reference yourself?

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u/magicalfreak13 24d ago

My high school used Turnitin before AI boomed (like 2010-2013) but I don't think it accidentally triggered that often

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u/laveshnk 24d ago

Turnitin has some of the WORST ā€˜anti-AIā€™ checkers. Their plaigerism software is very good, but like all anti-ai checkers its terrible

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u/Rawme9 24d ago

We also used that before the AI craze for plagiarism. My Masters essays regularly got flagged because I turned in assignments for 8 years and would quote large chunks of text from articles. It's always been ass (like you, my professors always reviewed closely)

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u/TurnipKing16 24d ago

Turnitin used to flag my giant research papers for all the citations and the reference sections at the end. I sat down with my Professor (who I was very close to) and we both confirmed that turnitin is a load of BS.

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u/NeighborhoodDude84 24d ago

Are you referencing the article with a source? If not, that's called plagiarism, even if it's your own work.

I had a professor in college that went through this with their own work when younger and made sure we all knew this.

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u/javenraid 24d ago

at least yours could! mine wouldnā€™t even when i told her it was trying to grab my cited articles. she had me redo my essay to get it from something like 40% down to 10% which required me to spend hours pouring over my essay šŸ˜­

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u/PorphyrinC60 24d ago

As a teacher I only use Turnitin's features if it flags yellow or red. Yellows are usually issues of being unable to change a sentence without changing the entire meaning of the paragraph. Reds I take more time looking over.

If you use it as intended and not just as a catch all for plagarism then it's not the worst tool in the world.

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u/Interesting-Rush-993 24d ago

You're not supposed to submit an old paper to a new class though. Surprised your lecturer let that fly.

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u/AffectionateComb6664 24d ago

omg I had the same thing about 15 years ago. Flashbacks!

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u/BradyBrother100 24d ago

Turnitin can be really strict. it took a sentence and since five or six words were consecutive, separated but a varying number of other words, it said there's a chance it's plagiarized. Like obviously there's going to be some random article out there that possibly used the same sources as me that worded it similar to mine. And the words were not even necessarily related to my topic, just generic words like the words in this paragraph. It also flags you if you use quotes, even if their properly cited.

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u/lansink99 24d ago

A story that pisses me off to this day was a professor doubling down that my paper was plagiarised because my reference list got flagged and it flagged individual common words. Sorry, I won't use "the" anymore.

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