Turnitin Avis 69

Turnitin.com has been known for it's horrible accuracy, and it wasn't until I was forced to be under it's control that I fully realized how bad it is. It has flagged multiple handwritten writings as AI or plagiarized, throwing multiple days of work out the window.

I've been flagged for AI multiple times. Both times were specifically topics and structures that were very cut-and-dry. Although I use Grammarly, it flags both my original wording and any correct punctuation/grammar (corrected or my own). It seems to blanket-sweep, including things that are simply correct, which discourages unique and good writing. Students, including myself, are forced to informalize our material just to not get flagged. Once flagged, professors tend to take this at face value without any supporting evidence and report the student for dishonourable conduct.

Turnitin AI should be used as a tool to encourage fair and unique writing, not an easy way for professors to blind-grade. Before allowing professors to use this, there needs to be a knowledge training process to educate them on how to use it ethically.

Comparison: Students used ChatGPT to write their schoolwork; professors use Turnitin to (blind) grade students' work.

I spent forty hours working on a college essay for my favorite class: Love and Passion in the Age of King Charles III (2022–Present). I cited so. Many. Sources. My grammar was good. I poured my heart, my soul, my LIFE into that paper. I made COMPELLING, ORIGINAL claims. I thought I would get, like, a Pulitzer or an Academy Award for it.

Two days after submitting, my teacher called me into his office.

"Jason Depp (that's my name)– Turnitin indicated that you auto-generated 935% of your essay with ChatGPT. You are a liar, a slacker, and you clearly know NOTHING about love and passion in the Age of Charles III. And guess what, sucker? You're expelled!!"

I hadn't CHEATED! Yet I was expelled from HarvardStanfordCambridge University and had to become an uncertified dog trainer. This allowed me to enroll at a trashy online school and begin working towards a degree in municipal services. I had to write a piece about plastic recycling. I spent thirty minutes on it, did basically no research, and made it as bad as possible. Microsoft Word gave me 6769 grammar suggestions. It got an A+, because Turnitin said there was no AI use and my teacher was like... YAH! Das ist HOT!

Turnitin seems to reward work that is riddled with errors and exhibits, um, aggressive boredom. 'Cause if you write and research well, you must be a @#$%&*!@#$% cheater who uses AI for every step of the writing process. From now on, I will be recording every part of my writing process: the mental agony of coming up with ideas; the grueling research; and finally, the process by which I commit all my thoughts, hopes, dreams, and efforts to paper. But now you can generate videos. So how will my professors even know that the documentation of my work is real?

Mega-love to the people at Turnitin, and to anyone reading this review. But if we've lost the ability to trust one another at such a bloody deep level, maybe there be more at stake than simply determining whether or not a paper is AI-generated.

~ Jason Depp.

Turnitin is a terrible tool, plain and simple. It constantly flags my work for plagiarism even when I’ve cited everything correctly. I’m in criminal justice, where using specific legal terms and rules is required. These aren’t things you can just reword without losing meaning. Yet Turnitin still flags them like I’m doing something wrong, even when everything is properly referenced. This isn’t just frustrating, it’s unfair. I’m doing the work honestly, following the rules, and still getting penalized because of an unreliable detection tool. At this point, Turnitin isn’t helping maintain academic integrity, it’s undermining it. When a system can’t tell the difference between properly cited material and actual plagiarism, it stops being a tool and becomes a problem.

Schools tend to use either Microslop's or Google's toolsets. Both of them include a feature a change log to your documents. Teachers can so easily check for your writing process. They can view your manual changes and slow progress. Something that just does not happen if you plagarize or use AI. They can see what and where you copied and pasted. This renders these tools useless.

If a monkey was given a typewriter and randomly typed things without knowing it, assuming the monkey and typewriter will last for practically forever, the monkey will eventually write all of Shakespeare's works as its own original creation. Now that is assuming this is all happening randomly. So if there are humans trying to write their own work about a topic that others have covered, then of course there will be similar wording.

Furthermore, these tools hurt people's lives. They use a clanker to see if you generated a paper with a clanker or copied someone else's work. Clankers hallucinate. We've all likely seen a humorous screenshot of a clanker saying something so idiotic. For example, Google Gemini stating you should eat rocks as a source of vitamins minerals. Would you trust Gemini with your grade, your degree, your life after seeing that? I highly doubt you would. So how can we trust clankers to decide whether or not our paper is legitimate.

Every time I submit a paper to Turnitin, I fear it is going to flag me, and I will be fighting an uphill battle where I am guilty until proven innocent, fighting for my integrity, my honor, my grade, and ultimately my life.

Uploading an essay to Turnitin is more stressful than nearly drowning. It is more pain inducing than a volleyball flying into your groin area. One erroneous citation or even a well varied vocabulary suddenly becomes a snare. Good writing is now an academic vice. My writing style has drastically changed due to Turnitin. I no longer write with my once beloved not only x but also y sentence structure. This sentence format allows for great writing, but I cannot trust that the clanker seeing if I am human to understand that. I no longer use M-dashes. I even got some points docked off because of my poor grammar on a paper. Grammar that could have been solved if I had used an M-dash. But at what cost?

The generations before us may have had to walk through the snow and at at absolute zero, going uphill both ways, fighting off wild beasts who come in their path. But the one thing they did not have to fight was a clanker. AI writing is bad. Yet, this is the real plague on academics.

Very bad experience. It flagged a hand written, 100% original paper as AI.

Horrible tool. My thesis just got flagged as AI, I wrote everything myself and did 30 hours on this thing for my uni and now I have to go to a review board and argue my case. I have version history + can explain + have actual sources yet the teacher rather believe a tool over a human first. Why are schools so gung-ho about AI, yet all the other things that helped education: books, calculators, the internet are ay-ok.

This app is garbage. Unless a student uses terrible grammar or spelling, it marks everything as AI. Its nothing but a headache that causes unnecessary angst in students and non-stop or unnecessary follow-up and due diligence for professors.

Turnitin deleted all the feedback I had written without giving me the chance to recover it, wasting a considerable amount of work. This is unacceptable.

North Korea could make a better plagiarism detector than this. Even the penguins from Madagascar would have put in more effort and delivered a better plagiarism/AI detector than this.
Shame

Is this a joke? Universities pay money to this scam of a software? Who code it this? As all other users have mentioned, it literally takes anything that is similar to anything else out there as plagiarism, and this means titles and references, even your won university name is "plagiarized", this is so bad i dont have words for it. And yet they are still getting paid by universities... a joke.

Unfortunately, I could not give a 0.2 stars out of 5. I cited my quotes, gave my references, wrote "Literature review, introduction, definitions" and this damn apps highlights everything. It even highlights phrases that have nothing to do with the content raising the similarity report to 22%. And on top of that, my Uni insists that this application can store my data- more like steal it.

My best advice is, ensure that it is highlighting words that is used in the same context, else it is useless.

The fact that the destiny of some students is in the hands of the institutions that rely on this software, which is far from accurate, is terrifying.

Turnitin appears to be operating as a profit-driven machine, enabled by its dominant position in the market. Despite its public emphasis on “integrity,” it continues to promote claims of 98% accuracy that are increasingly difficult to justify given the evident unreliability of its AI-detection system. Generative AI has only become widespread in the past few years, yet an essentially unvalidated tool is now being used to judge students’ work, often producing significant false positives. The fact that the system has even flagged the Bible as 75% AI-generated raises serious questions about the credibility and scientific robustness of their methodology.

I wrote a paragraph of 200 e were odds by my own hands, turnitin gave 100% result as an AI writing.
What a rubbish

If I could, I'd give it a negative score of -100. After each update, Turnitin becomes more and more STUPID. Everything I wrote had been detected as AI-generated. I dont know why universities are still using this useless tool.

Da mogu stavila bi 0. Aplikacija je užasna i samo vara ljude da plate i onda ne dobiju ništa sve ostane kako je. Svaki put kad stavite istu datoteku prikaže vam različit postotak što znači da izbaci samo random kako bi se platilo. Užasno iskustvo NE PREPORUČUJEM PLAĆANJE NITI IŠTA OD OVE APLIKACIJE JER NIJE REALNA!!

one Day schools will realize this site is just a scam and decide to do away with it. Milking students money for subscription for doing nothing

I'm literally using turnitin from 2024. it's so worse, everyday i'm facing issues, it does'nt work propely, too slow and is very strict. i get frustrated using it