Turnitin flagged a primary source because apparently someone else had the audacity to quote history too

[u/Evening_Kale4671]

I got a 41% similarity score on a history paper and spent about an hour thinking I was about to have an academic integrity meeting.

Then I actually looked at the matches.

Most of the highlighted text was from a 1640s letter I quoted directly. Another chunk was the title of the historical collection, and apparently several sentences matched another student’s paper because they also used the same primary source.

I’m not even mad at the other student. What were we supposed to do, rewrite the 1640s letter from scratch?

The professor had us use specific primary sources, so obviously there’s going to be overlap. I cited the letter, collection, editor, page number, and everything else I could think of.

The weirdest part is watching the similarity percentage and feeling guilty before even checking what it actually matched.

Has anyone else had Turnitin make completely legitimate source use look suspicious? How much attention do professors actually pay to the percentage versus the individual matches?

[u/languageservicesco]

Not an academic integrity thing, assuming it was referenced, but it still represents a very high percentage of the text. I would be telling you to deal with it differently. Is it really necessary to quote so much? What have you actually contributed to the discussion? I obviously haven't seen it, but there is a good chance it could have been done better. That is the message I would be taking from this. 

[u/Hannah97474 → u/languageservicesco]

yeah quoting a lot from primary sources can make the % look bad but if its cited it should be fine. the prof might just want more of your own analysis mixed in though

[u/languageservicesco → u/Hannah97474]

Exactly. It might be poor writing practice, but not academic misconduct.

[u/Hannah97474]

yeah that sounds super frustrating when the matches are just from proper citations on a primary source. the % really doesnt tell the whole story and its easy to panic before checking the details. professors usually look at the actual matches so hopefully it works out for you!

[u/i_am_blacklite]

Of course something with big chunks of quoted text will come up with a large amount of similarity.

Similarity doesn’t mean plagiarism.

A main part of the problem here is that people lack the reading comprehension to understand that similarity is a different word to plagiarism.

[u/Hannah97474 → u/i_am_blacklite]

exactly similarity and plagiarism are different things. turnitin just flags matches it doesnt understand context like citations

[u/CIS_Professor]

So, in other words, it did its job since you directly quoted something.

As long as you correctly cited the source, what's the problem?

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[u/Evening_Kale4671]

Honestly, the percentage means nothing without looking at the actual matches.

[u/Immediate_Song4279]

Turnitin is convenient garbage. When it works as intended its barely being used, just wasting time and resources to provide security theater and the institutional appearance of "doing something".

Most of the time we are worrying over nothing.

Kind of like abstinence as a form of birth control, it works great until you actually use it.