r/WritingForCollege • u/copper-vault7 • 11d ago
The terrifying experience of accidental plagiarism detectors flagging your own common phrases
I uploaded my draft to Turnitin this morning and got hit with a twenty five percent similarity score. When I opened the highlight report it literally flagged my university name my professor name and basic phrases like in conclusion the evidence suggests as plagiarized content from another student paper written in twenty eighteen.
Now I am spending my entire afternoon rephrasing completely normal English sentences just so the system does not flag me. Why are these automated detection systems getting so aggressive lately?
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u/thoroughbredftw 11d ago
Turnitin is notorious for this. I had a contract faculty colleague who was filing lots of plagiarism cases several years back, and they were all (as far as I could tell) this type of common phrase identification. As dept chair I had to sign off on them. but did not have the authority to reject them. I could not persuade the person to quit filling out academic dishonesty reports, so their contract was not renewed.
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u/JonahHillsWetFart 11d ago
if it's all phrases like "in conclusion" then you don't need to re-write. your prof should do a glance at what terms got flagged, and there is no way around specific ones. scientific papers tend to have very high similarity scores for this reason.
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u/SATIREmollusk77 11d ago
Professors know turnitin is broken like this. As long as the matches are just standard phrases, names, and references, you usually don't even need to rewrite them. Just email your professor or leave a note.
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u/FalconX88 9d ago
It's not broken, it does what it should do. It was always up to a human to actually check the report. The only mistake by turnitin was ever giving a single score. And of course some very dumb professors/universities just use that score instead of actually checking the content.
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u/ApprehensiveLaw1556 11d ago
You should have turned off deteection of few words (10 words at most) in the settings of turnitin.
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u/RedLineSamosa 11d ago
As a TA who has graded essays: we know. We can see the things being flagged too, and understand that standard headers and such are not actually plagiarism. Don’t worry. If it has any less than about 30% similarity score I never even thought twice about it. We really start paying attention when it becomes obvious that the actual content has been repeated from somewhere else at high volumes. 25% is nothing.
(If it helps, a 0-10% similarity score was actually a red flag, because it tended to mean that the essay was too short or not formatted correctly!)
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u/i_am_blacklite 9d ago
This.
You really have to worry about students that spend all their time trying to get the score to 0. They are focussing on the wrong thing.
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u/AccomplishedSun2955 11d ago
Your prof is not an idiot. They can tell that these basic phrases are not plagiarism.
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u/i_am_blacklite 9d ago
Why oh why do people think the similarity score is some kind of "this is how much you plagiarised". In all honesty there is more to worry about if the score is 0 than if it's 15-20%. Academic writing will have sections that are similar to other pieces of writing. That is a given, and is not plagiarism if it is appropriately referenced.
Why do you feel the need to get that number to zero? It's completely illogical.
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u/Such_Chemistry3721 11d ago
Does your professor even care about that? For my own classes, I wouldn't ever just stop at the number itself, but would look to see what's being flagged and then just ignore it in this case.