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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.
Papers were... objectively worse
Are you some kind of minority/disadvantaged person? If so, I bet the real issue was that you were triggering their "bigotry of low expectations" by writing well enough that they just assumed you must have been cheating.
Depends on who you’d ask, but I don’t believe that was it. No, it was just spontaneous tone shifts as I moved from a topic I didn’t care about to one that I did.
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.
Do you remember what the one with better algo was? I've got some friends in the education sector that had to deal with the turnitin BS from the other side.
I've no idea, sorry, it was long ago.
They use it for PhDs here.
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 remember getting flagged on my sources and properly attributed quotes. I'm sorry joe schmoe and I both quoted the same article and used the same quote from it.
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.
Okay buy that sounds hard and I use tech because it's easy, so...
Fuck TurnItIn. They make their money off student papers. They don’t actually index shit.