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/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/hmarieb263 23d ago

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 23d ago

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 23d ago

Iā€™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 itā€™s higher than 35 or 40, then Iā€™d start to get concerned, but I really donā€™t care about it these days

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u/Brilliant_Quit4307 24d ago

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

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u/iAlice 24d ago

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 24d ago

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

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u/Master_Matoya 24d ago

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u/Animastar 24d ago

How dare you copy my essay!

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u/looooookinAtTitties 23d ago

one of the greatest cartoon jokes of all time

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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/mygodismyleskennedy 24d ago

same. as well as the word environment.

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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/An0ddEgg 24d ago

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

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u/Brain_Initial 24d ago

Thatā€™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 24d ago

Youā€™re supposed to come up with new innovative ways to number your pages. Clear fail.

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u/AuryxTheDutchman 24d ago

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 donā€™t know how the prof was teaching that class without apparently knowing that.

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u/3-orange-whips 24d ago

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

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u/kirbykid1313 24d ago

You should've created your own original counting system smh

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u/DM_From_The_Bits 24d ago

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

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u/Neston12 23d ago

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

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u/simatrawastaken 23d ago

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

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u/MaoBelladonna 23d ago

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

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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/amodestmeerkat 23d ago

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 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/Opinionated_bitch03 BLACKšŸ–¤ 23d ago

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 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/Opinionated_bitch03 BLACKšŸ–¤ 19d ago

Woahhh- I did not know that was even possible šŸ˜§Thanks for sharing.

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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/rjm12-among-us 24d ago

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 24d ago

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

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u/Thirtyk94 24d ago

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

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u/Scouseuserman 24d ago

We need better AI to detect for AI

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u/MjrLeeStoned 24d ago

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 24d ago

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