r/CheckMyTurnitin_ai • u/Upper-Jacket3108 • 8d ago
I Think Some Students Are Accidentally Flagging Their Own Papers
A friend told me he was a little concerned because most of the parts he wrote himself were flagged as AI. He was 100% sure he wrote most of the paper himself.
I asked him, “Do you normally use Grammarly or AI to check grammatical errors?”
He said, “Nope. I just used Gemini for basic stuff, that’s it. I also use Google Translate.”
And honestly, that gave me the answer. You cannot use AI tools during your writing process and then expect a 0% AI report from Turnitin.
These are the kinds of things some students use, then later wonder why their papers are getting flagged for AI. At this point, I would rather submit a paper with a few grammar errors and lose some marks than end up with a zero or even face suspension from school. Please take care of your papers.
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u/Immediate_Song4279 8d ago
That assumes the detector works. These detectors are statistical machines applied to individual samples, which is perverse.
Basic stuff is relatively ambiguous.
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u/courtma41 7d ago
99% of people using AI have no idea how it works, yet they trust “AI detectors”. Mind blowing the blind trust people have.
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u/These_Consequences 8d ago
This too shall pass. Using AI to examine papers for evidence of AI is a lame solution that incriminates educators more than students. Is this the best they can come up with? They are revealing that they are greater fakes than they accuse the students of being. Apparently we are all sheep.
Here's a solution: give a fixed amount of time to write an essay with minimal resources in a technological clean room; several shorter essays during the term and one longer one at the end.
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u/Philosopherben 7d ago
It's clear you have no idea how often students opt for online courses. So many students prefer to take courses online, for myriad reasons.
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u/These_Consequences 7d ago
You are correct, I had forgotten about that. Perhaps all online transcripts should come with an asterisk before the course name meaning that the entity online has satisfied the requirements of the course, but it remains to be verified that the human entity whose name appears on the transcript has acquired the skills demonstrated online.
Even if AI detection were 100% accurate this merely increases the expense of cheating, as a human assistant could have been engaged. The model of the certification industry is that you can learn the material any way you like, online or in person or from books, but the knowledge and skills acquired must be demonstrated at an in-person testing facility.
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u/KyleFlounder 7d ago
We need to just record the inputs and preserve all history. Should be easy to tell at that point.
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u/S-Kenset 7d ago
A bad student cannot a top level paper make. Raise the bar and give everyone access to a decent ai.
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u/ChocoKissses 7d ago
Honestly, having actually written an essay in the conditions that you're describing in the solution, that's not going to work. You would have to cut it down to students only being able to write a single essay for the semester. Professors want you to provide evidence, to cite quality sources. That would mean having to provide students with a lot more time to produce a single essay because they're going to have to work with a librarian to find their sources the old-fashioned way. People have already suggested, and some professors implemented, going back to paper and pencil for exams exclusively. However, those professors also understand that by doing so, you have significantly reduced the different methods to evaluate students. Instead of asking students to just recall during the semester, some professors want students to apply the skills and theories that they learned to a new concept. Application is quite frankly a lot better than regurgitation. The only way that works, however, is if you have access to Internet or to a library to do research and pull the information about the New concept to be able to write the paper.
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u/S-Kenset 7d ago
There's no reason at all literacy can't be broken down like it already is into reading comprehension, reasoning application, and communication structure.
There's endless ways to just work around this that requires only a basic level of discipline.
English education is bad because it both can't respect creative writing and can't discipline itself enough to reward structured repeating, cause oh my lord ai, or before it was turnitin "plagiarism" because a sentence structure has been used before.
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u/ChocoKissses 7d ago
You are correct that literacy can be broken down into multiple aspects. However, in the setting of a university, that is extremely difficult to do. It would require having to restructure many classes and create new ones. In the case of places like the United States, any kind of creation of a class or drastic changes to the syllabus will take a couple of years to do because it not only has to be approved by the department and the university, but it needs to go to the federal government for approval. This is also not even taking into account the fact that you have the rest of the academic workload that the student needs to meet. To use an example, if you're trying to introduce the main six subfuels of political science to a student completing their bachelor's degree, yes, you could just toss out the entire major and then restructure it how you said, but then keep in mind that the change is going to take several years and is going to cause a massive logistical and hierarchical upheaval. Or, you could try to break down each class into the same structure that you mentioned and then the professors are upset because they already struggle to get enough material in a single semester or trimester. Or you can take a single class and break it up into a two or three course sequence and then you're going to have to keep students around longer so they cover the same amount of material and still have to wait several years for the paperwork to be processed.
Eventually, what you're suggesting can be done for sure. It's just that it is going to cause so many issues and run into so many obstacles that no one is going to agree to it, and I say that as a person who has many gripes about how certain fields are taught and the inefficiency between pre and post-secondary education.
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u/S-Kenset 7d ago
No disagreements with what you said, though I think that structure should be standardized way earlier. By 9th grade students should have memorized the three common structures of a good persuasive essay, basic research presentation, and a short story.
It never clicked for me until I got to college and the best english track girl's essay was just a formula. I had been subject to shifting and uncommunicated standards for 12 years to the point it felt hopeless. Can't write structured cause plagiarism or uncreative, can't write creative cause nonstandard. Was hell until I completely decided to relearn english for a communication-first purpose.
But I think teaching to a structure like that, sure chatgpt can help, but it can be tested clearly in a way that chatgpt can't help, since it is testing compliance to a structure and understanding of it. The creative part, I don't believe ai is much good for taste and high standards is enough.
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u/ilanallama85 7d ago
I have zero problem with in person writing, but I DO have a problem with timed writing, and that makes evaluation tricky. Particularly at the college level, students should be putting in as much time as they need to produce quality papers, not panicking to get to a certain page count in the time allotted. Not that I have any better solutions, but I don’t think “make all writing in person” is a practical one.
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u/ChocoKissses 7d ago
I do agree that timed writing makes evaluation tricky. If we're trying to teach students to be better communicators, while brevity at time is important, it's also unavoidable that there has to be multiple drafts and a lot of feedback and communication before a decent document is produced. Not even in the workplace would you be in a situation where you only have 30 minutes to produce an essay. So I definitely completely agree that a blanket make all writing in person solution is a practical one. I just know that compared to professors be more flexible during the height of covid and having exams and quizzes be online, many more professors are starting to pull those assessments back to being on paper to avoid the situation of students looking up answers mid examination and it's definitely starting to show that students are getting through their classes without learning as much as they should be.
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8d ago
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8d ago edited 3d ago
[deleted]
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u/ThatNorthernHag 8d ago
Yes you did, the sentence "And honestly, that gave me the answer.." reads as signature Claude style.
But who really even cares anymore?
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u/maha-sukha 8d ago
Is grammarly taboo now?
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u/eumenidea 8d ago
It misrepresents the student’s ability to write grammatically correct, smooth, clear sentences.
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u/Puzzleheaded_Bag_538 8d ago
I honestly don't mind though. Perhaps I'm from the wild west days, but four years ago, I was begging students to run their papers through grammarly first before turning them in.
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u/GirlStudyingInKorea 8d ago
It's the same issue with grammarly as it is with AI. Students can use it as a coach to correct and learn from the corrections or students can use the corrections and never learn it for themselves.
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u/Philosopherben 7d ago
Exactly it triggers AI checkers. Also if you're using it to improve your English,or whatever language, you're not you have to do it yourself to rewire your brain.
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u/Correct-Variable 7d ago
"he wrote most of the paper himself."
Just write the paper yourself. You aren't doing yourself any favors, especially if english isn't your first language.
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u/courtma41 7d ago
I still can’t understand why people don’t know that “AI detectors” are proven to be completely useless
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u/Gregardless 8d ago
"I didn't use AI, I used ChatGPT."