TurnitinReviews of turnitin.com

Utterly useless piece of technology

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.

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.