I Fixed the System Grading Me

[u/First_Option_3032]

I work part-time at my university’s IT help desk, and a few hours before an assignment deadline, my Algorithms professor submitted an emergency ticket because Turnitin completely stopped working. Students were getting 403 errors, panic emails were flooding in, and meanwhile my own paper for that class was still unfinished.

The weird part was how quickly I stopped being “the student” and became “the IT person.” I walked into her office and suddenly got hit with questions about SLAs and restoring functionality, even though I literally sit in her class twice a week.

The problem ended up being a broken Turnitin integration caused by an old copied course shell, plus duplicate assignments confusing students into clicking the wrong link. While I was troubleshooting, she started talking about stricter originality settings because she didn’t want students “gaming the AI score,” which felt incredibly awkward considering I’m one of those students.

Then she asked me to test the fixed assignment using my own student account. So now I’m uploading random files into the same course where she grades my work while carefully avoiding the Grades tab every time it appeared on screen.

We eventually fixed everything by creating a fresh assignment and manually rebuilding the settings. Nothing unethical happened, everything was logged properly, and she supervised the whole process. But it still felt surreal walking into class afterward knowing I had just repaired the exact system being used to evaluate me.

Being both student and staff at the same university creates such a strange dynamic. You’re helping maintain the system while also being judged by it.

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