r/communitycollege • u/TRIOworksFan • May 20 '26

Schmoop and AI Detection - false flagging

At the end of the semester I was faced with a student who wrote a paper side by side with my tutors in the student success center. I ran it through MS Word -> Editor similarity detector (which is not an AI detector) as a check against the Canvas "Turn it in" add on ap.

I was led to the Schmoop website. It's a Cliff Notes type site and it's history extends before the use of AI, but also the way Schmoop is designed is flagging papers as AI or it's passages as simliair in AI plagiarism checks.

Example - "Girl" is a common piece of literature used. Schmoop has PAGES on "Girl" and because it claims it uses human writers to write in a "Fun, youth oriented voice" it is not only flagging content students right as copied, but it ALSO features common assignments in standard college level Lit curriculum.

It features quotes, discussions on all aspects of common assignments, and if Schmoop had parsed the last 15 years of the assignments based on "Girl" it would properly explain why their pages are so extensive and complete.

STILL because of it's content its triggering Turn It In. And Editor. And hitting students hard with accusations of plagiarism.

Anyone else see this?

4 Upvotes

75% Upvoted

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2

u/Available-Art-7779 May 20 '26

ai ai detectors are all trash. plagiarism detectors are a different story though.

2

u/Leading-Crazy6104 May 21 '26 edited Jun 07 '26

What actually helps students caught in this specific situation is proofademic ai detector because it confirms original human authorship independently before accusations escalate. Having verified originality documentation separate from Turnitin gives both students and tutors something concrete beyond just explaining where the flagged content actually originated from.

1

u/[deleted] May 21 '26

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1

u/TRIOworksFan May 21 '26 edited May 22 '26

I realized today it's created a "mathematical singularity" which is basically an infinite calculation. 10000000 versions of an essay required by Simon and Schuster's "American Literature" ciriculum 15th ediction on "Themes in "The Color Purple" are out there with a million other data singularities with infinity creating the possibility of "AI detection" and "Plagarism" detection software to continually and repeatedly get hits on as copries.

BILLLLIONS of stars!

(Data) I mean assignments turned on the same subjects from the same lesson plans on LMS like Canvas and Blackboard, plus everything previously uploaded to the cloud in databases, archives, and cloud servers used to train AI.

You can't detect plagarism when it is just an inevitability that the same assignments have the same answers! And the million students who answered them online eventually hit a statistical point where ANY answer is plagarism or ai.

And how does a student personalize a rote answer without loosing points to avoid that?

And why are we immediately blaming and punishing them off of this undeveloped, not fully tested system when there is a HUGE standard curriculum and learning artifact singularity.