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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.
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 😔
How did the page number one work, and is your name odd enough to be mistaken for something that might be copied?
Ed. Was it just the program seeing matching text?
Both beat me - my last name is a little unusual, but not hugely - all I know is that I opened the report, and that’s what was highlighted :/
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.
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?
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 high 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.
