I once had like a 40% plagiarism score because it considered phrases like "of the" as plagiarism. Worst part of all was that my professor initially took the score at face value so I had to argue my case
this post was submitted on 07 Dec 2025
325 points (99.1% liked)
Science Memes
17598 readers
1020 users here now
Welcome to c/science_memes @ Mander.xyz!
A place for majestic STEMLORD peacocking, as well as memes about the realities of working in a lab.
Rules
- Don't throw mud. Behave like an intellectual and remember the human.
- Keep it rooted (on topic).
- No spam.
- Infographics welcome, get schooled.
This is a science community. We use the Dawkins definition of meme.
Research Committee
Other Mander Communities
Science and Research
Biology and Life Sciences
- !abiogenesis@mander.xyz
- !animal-behavior@mander.xyz
- !anthropology@mander.xyz
- !arachnology@mander.xyz
- !balconygardening@slrpnk.net
- !biodiversity@mander.xyz
- !biology@mander.xyz
- !biophysics@mander.xyz
- !botany@mander.xyz
- !ecology@mander.xyz
- !entomology@mander.xyz
- !fermentation@mander.xyz
- !herpetology@mander.xyz
- !houseplants@mander.xyz
- !medicine@mander.xyz
- !microscopy@mander.xyz
- !mycology@mander.xyz
- !nudibranchs@mander.xyz
- !nutrition@mander.xyz
- !palaeoecology@mander.xyz
- !palaeontology@mander.xyz
- !photosynthesis@mander.xyz
- !plantid@mander.xyz
- !plants@mander.xyz
- !reptiles and amphibians@mander.xyz
Physical Sciences
- !astronomy@mander.xyz
- !chemistry@mander.xyz
- !earthscience@mander.xyz
- !geography@mander.xyz
- !geospatial@mander.xyz
- !nuclear@mander.xyz
- !physics@mander.xyz
- !quantum-computing@mander.xyz
- !spectroscopy@mander.xyz
Humanities and Social Sciences
Practical and Applied Sciences
- !exercise-and sports-science@mander.xyz
- !gardening@mander.xyz
- !self sufficiency@mander.xyz
- !soilscience@slrpnk.net
- !terrariums@mander.xyz
- !timelapse@mander.xyz
Memes
Miscellaneous
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
i had to use this for a bio class, cmb. yea it making alot of assumptions.
Turnitin is such garbage. I hated it in grad school in the mid 2010s, I can only imagine how fucking awful it is now.
It's the same awful.
The plagiarism checker we use where I am, I basically use it to check citations. Like... if it's 70% "plagiarized" it usually means either a student used proper citations, or they copied the instructions Into their submitted document.
we were forced to use it in my undergrad for cell and molecular course, it will make assumptions based on your sentence structure, hurts people that are not proficient in essay writing. It doesnt analyze the context.
turnitin once highlighted my page numbering as plagiarism
Whose page numbers did you pirate?
iirc it linked me to some paper someone wrote in Cardiff T–T
Genuinely. As a student I don't think I ever saw a Turnitin score for my work below 40%. There are only so many ways to wrute a sentence about the same thing, so its impossible to not accidentally plagiarise someone's works.
I remember one lecturer telling me that they don't really look at the % unless its something aggregious like +70%. But more often they're looking for patterns in what it highlights.
Loads of tiny highlights with individual sources are likely to be a false positive, but big chunks of highlights from only a couple of sources is likely to be a true positive.
Plagiarism should only ever be counted for explicitly unique sentences that provide actual value.
It's actually an ongoing debate in software engineering, due to licensing, as to what you can consider "stolen code" - i.e. plagiarism.
In fact things went as far as to some companies employing AI-aided automatic cease-and-desist deliveries on GitHub, but the system was so badly configured, it detected even the most basic logic bits as license infringement. Things that are standardised in software development - like, for example, for loops, that happened to have generic parameter names (e.g if you were to create a graphic subsystem for displaying Views, whatever the primary implementation may be, you'd iterate through all views with a for loop, making it a generic call such as for(val view in views) { [do something here] }).
Well this AI aided detector was so brilliant that it detected such minute coincidences of codebases as legitimate violations (as if any company could copyright generics), and sent these spurious C&Ds to dozens of git repos. What's even worse is that the initial company's codebase used some open source libraries that were directly attacked... for being 100% copies of their own codebase.
IMO as long as the code/sentence isn't a provably unique statement, plagiarism shouldn't apply. A whole paragraph having 80%+ similarity to something unique? Now that's worrying enough to investigate.
My PhD thesis got 11% owo
Fair enough. I imagine as a PhD its easier to avoid since you're doing new research, so you're presenting unique information with (in theory) unique sentences.
Whereas for a lot of undergrad students, up until the tail end of their degrees, they're writing about fairly extensively covered topics, so you're much more likely to accidentally steal wordings from others who have already written about them. In fact at that stage, I'd bet having too low a plagiarism score would more likely indicate you're barking up the wrong tree.
It's true. :)
I had a class where I had to write papers that couldn't go above a certain word count or it would be an instant fail, it had to contain at least a minimum amount of text directly quoted and cited from my source material, and also couldn't go above a 20% Turnitin score. I had every paper word-maxxed to the limit and of course Turnitin marked all of my quotations as plagiarized, it marked my entire citations page as plagiarized, and it also inexplicably marked every instance of the word "the" as plagiarized. Nothing else was marked plagiarized and I hit 20% on every paper I submitted. I complained to the instructor and told him the requirements were damn near impossible.
Fuck TurnItIn; they make their money off your papers.
Seriously. They don’t digitize books or magazines; they only have a database because (college) kids are forced to participate.
I had to put my name and the page number in the header of assignments and turnitin would always mark my name as plagiarized XD
I mean, did you source your parents? I expect in-text citations and inclusion of your birth certificate within the bibliography.
I am so glad this wasn't a thing when I was in school, I can't think of much that would have made me more angry than having to defend something I wrote myself against accusations of plagiarism
Or worse, being written by AI
Couple more weeks and I'll finally be free of TurnItIn 😁
Freeeeeeedom
Sadly your papers won’t. You should demand that they be removed from the database.
You can do that? I'd think that you signed a waiver the first time you uploaded something. Along with agreeing to arbitrage and handing over your first born.
You can, but it's a bit complicated.
You have to file the request with your teachers/professors, or with the school itself if you're unsure of who handles administration for the site over there. They're the ones that have the actual power to submit a deletion request for you.
It can be rejected on the basis of your schools policy, or they may simply ignore it. There's other issues that could come up too. Your school might also have some form or specific way for you to request it since according to turnitin they're the ones who control the data.
So you'll be joining the job market? Good news is that you will be free of turnitin...
Apparently a student at my school got 100% plagiarism score because they posted their essay on their blog lolllll
This was back in 2010 when blogs were somewhat popular and I think Google+ was still around.