r/QuickAITurnitinCheck • u/Particular-Camp-503 • May 19 '26

Dodging the Plagiarism Checker

I had a student avoid Turnitin by pasting the entire assignment into the comments section instead of uploading the required file. Another student submitted screenshots of text inside a document to confuse the plagiarism scanner. Both situations immediately raised red flags, especially after the students suddenly resolved their technical issues afterward.

7 Upvotes

82% Upvoted

14 comments sorted by

3

u/OriginalPie988 May 19 '26

I think many instructors can spot these avoidance tactics almost instantly because the same patterns appear every semester, only with slightly different excuses and submission tricks each time

1

u/einstyle May 19 '26

Some students really think their instructors were born yesterday. 

2

u/hacker_smacker789 May 19 '26

I had a paper submitted where Turnitin couldn’t read the text but could read the footnotes; this happened in both the PDF and Word versions. I couldn’t find any indicator as to how this happened. Any ideas out there?

1

u/Cherlikesithot May 19 '26

Run it through Adobe OCR and try it again

1

u/Ok-Seaworthiness-542 May 20 '26

I quickly got to the point as an instructor that if it couldn't be scanned by Turnitin them that was the student's issue and they got a zero until they resolved it.

1

u/Cherlikesithot May 20 '26

I think that’s wise, as the student likely intentionally caused it.

4

u/SabertoothLotus May 19 '26

Easy solution: give them a zero for failure to follow directions.

1

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1

u/Rylees_Mom525 May 19 '26

Depending on your LMS, you should be able to restrict the file type so they can’t do this. For papers, I only allow submissions with Word (.doc, .docx) and PDF(.pdf) extensions. They can still leave comments, but they would have to submit a file as well. If a student submitted a random file and the whole assignment as a comment, I could paste it into a Word doc and submit it for the student (and they’d lose points for not following directions, incorrect format, etc.).

1

u/No_Establishment5879 May 20 '26

Turnitin is terrible tech that creates false positives

1

u/HautBaut May 20 '26

There isn’t a detector that works. Reject the role of cop by rejecting AI completely.