Oh fucking hell I hate this thing.

I am going back to school through work. I didn't have this bullshit in my younger days. It's made me drop my honors courses due to an asinine endless loop of hell.

Whatever X percent matches as plagiarism. Professor says Y% is calculated for, for template formatting, etc. Still have some highlights of 3-4 words here and there, starting or ending paragraphs, "describe "blah"" answers that no matter how you re-word them something highlights. OK. Get creative with wording and phrasing, rewrite again.

Now I'm pinged as using AI to do my writing. What?! Asshat prof basically has to side teach me where to check for this, school doesn't have a tool. Fucker, I am old and can write faster than some chatbot. They've prob been trained on my whole generations writings.

Anyway. If I cleared the plagiarism, I failed the AI writing check. If I corrected my paper and cleared the AI check, I failed the plagiarism again. Fuck Turnitin.

I once got flagged for plagiarism because I had page numbers! Also once got a flag for plagiarising... ✨myself✨ because I had ✨my name✨ on the front page 😔

It's only a problem if you have a lazy assessor who just takes the similarly score and runs with it.

When I was marking essays 10 years ago, I saw Turnitin as a manual review tool. You feed an essay into the program, and it would give a percentage for similarly. It would panic students to see that the program was finding some similarly, but unless it was very high, the score was mostly useless.

The useful part is where it highlights the passages that it thought were problematic. Almost all the time those highlighted passages were properly attributed sources, so not plagiarism. If you had an excessive amount of cited material, I might give a lower mark because of less original thought, but it's still not plagiarism.

I can't believe this PoS is being used still and has these problems still. I left high school like 10 years ago and it's what we used there.

I remember one dumbass teacher issued a template for a coursework assignment then tried to fail everyone because it flagged shigh similarity scores because of his own template. Keyword tried because everybody threw enough of a fit to make it stop.

Even as I started uni, it was a different software with a far better algo, that didn't flag like lecturer/professor provided code we were working with for a given assignment and such.

Using this for academic papers for PhDs or something would be another level of absurd. Imagine doing a lit review lol.

This wasn’t uncommon in pre-digital academia. The number of times I was baselessly accused of plagiarism was ridiculous. For years. Eventually, I decided to start plagiarizing. If I had to fight my professors every other paper, regardless, I might as well do it, right? Papers were quicker to write, objectively worse, and usually accepted without issue. I’m still pissed off.

Fuck TurnItIn. They make their money off student papers. They don’t actually index shit.

What makes it worse is it matching essays from other students in other schools that were turned in privately. Do they not expect people to say the same things when given the same topic?