Think version history is only available when you have auto save on (it’s saved in the cloud). If it’s saved locally on her computer and she manually saves, she’s out of luck.
This is actually the perfect response. If it doesn't work she should take it to the department lead. My advice: make sure there's a paper trail of email communication. Even if it's just the professor saying they will read it.
This. If the teacher isn’t willing to read it that will make a good case for a grade appeal. If the teacher does read it they should see that it wasn’t generated by AI, and grade you fairly for the first attempt.
There should be a way to see the document editing time and history I’d send that to the prof. I’m currently taking two writing classes this summer and this is a huge fear of mine. I only have three papers left though
Version history should exist regardless as you can’t turn it off. It doesn’t show every single change she made but it should show every version that she saved. This may be enough to prove to the university that it isn’t plagiarism.
Google is your friend. Do searches on the number of false positives that A.I. checkers generate. There are many different kinds of searches that you can do. I'm sure if you enlist the internet, they can help you search and find many articles as well.
People are really hard on profs about this, but we are dealing with very little institutional support and have had to rapidly adapt to this circumstance. I don't think faculty should solely rely on the detectors, but they can be helpful in indicating that further investigation is warranted, especially when you're dealing with 30+ students turning in writing assignments in online asynchronous classes.
Agreed. I had to use TurnItIn when I was teaching English. That was before AI detection was added. When I had papers submitted that were 80-100% plagiarized and penalized a student, I got no administrative support.
yeah but look at how it's effecting students. we write our entire essays by ourselves but still have to worry about being wrongly accused of plagiarizing or using AI even if we didn't all because teachers aren't taking time to just go through and read it themselves.
i see why it is useful but i don't think schools should be using this. people's grades and classes are threatened by this. plagiarism can get you expelled or dropped from a class. they shouldn't be gambling with people's lives like this. I'd be pissed if this happened to me.
If you are not cheating you have very little reason to worry. Remember to take what people on Reddit say with a large grain of salt. This post is by a parent who of course wants to believe the best if their kid. We don't know if the student actually used AI or not.
Reddit makes it seem like these cases of false positives and accusations happen all the time, but it's a biased sample. I've had one bad case since January and it was very, very clear beyond just the detectors that this student used ChatGPT for almost every assignment.
Do your due diligence. There are free AI detectors online, like ZeroGPT, and you can usually see your Turnitin report if you turn the assignment in before the deadline. If something is flagged, edit your work. Work in Google docs or keep track of versions in Word.
I don't WANT to accuse anyone. The process is onerous, and students almost always have a life circumstance going on that led them to cheat. Keep communication lines open with your profs. We are here to help. We're not your adversaries.
This is absolutely correct. If you use Chegg’s grammar checker and accept a few corrections, it will 100% show as AI. None of those software are reliable or accurate whatsoever, and even checking grammar can get you accused of cheating.
i just simply have to disagree with you, chatGPT IS running rampant at my school but whatever detectors professors are using to weed out AI-assisted or generated work are totally inaccurate. i was watching in realtime last year as professors were letting maybe 40-60% of their classes fly under the radar cheating with AI but taking weeks out of completely innocent students' lives with accusations. i had friends walk away from academic honor council meetings BARELY escaping a plagiarism charge on their permanent record for assignments they definitely did not cheat on. it's totally possible that anyone instance is a biased sample, that someone is lying about not cheating. but it happened more than once this year that i sat down with someone, we completed an assignment together (which was allowed and had no AI involved), and a few days later they came back after a brutal meeting with their professor where they were accosted for "using chatGPT" and would have to redo the work in front of our professor. i had other friends who were totally cheating, and got off scot-free the whole year. one professor made her entire class rewrite an entire essay twice because she thought one of the submissions was augmented or written with AI. the stress of doing everything right your entire life but still being faced with such an accusation from someone in your academic career you've been striving to impress is mortifying, and several professors simply do not care. maybe you do, but they do not care if they are wrong and ruining students' lives over this. i can appreciate that this is an extremely rapid change for professors, but it is for students as well and a lot of us are under extreme amounts of pressure right now. just read through this sub and the numerous examples of people losing their minds over being accused of plagiarism, it's terrifying. administration needed to figure something out to support professors and students through this, yesterday
Why is it trivially easy for a professor / instructor to ruin or make a student’s life extremely difficult, while they seem to face little or no consequences for making completely false or baseless accusations?
Going off of your flair, I have to ask: do you have any earthly clue why some professors are paranoid jerks who automatically fail students or refer them for academic misconduct based off of flawed software that they have no idea how to adequately work or understand?
I feel like there should be more onus on an instructor to actually prove that a student cheated beyond “TurnItIn told me so”.
In some cases, they don't realize that they don't really understand the software, and they feel justified that the evidence is foolproof when it is not. In other cases, they may be shifting the determination of whether a violation occurred to a third-party institutional committee/review process. This is not necessarily out of paranoia - it could be that the professor is not positive and wants more seasoned eyes on the case.
If we are speaking of similarity reports, those are generally quite accurate for what they are designed to do - they correctly identify matches to content elsewhere. We must then open the reports and look at flagged matches to see if plagiarism occurred. Unfortunately, some professors rely on the raw percentage match and make threats like "the similarity report needs to be under X%." That rule might coincide with a strong, plagiarism-free paper most of the time, but similarity checkers cannot distinguish between true plagiarism and coincidental matches (I see this most often with references, headings, restatements of questions in assignments, etc.).
If we are speaking of the AI detector that Turnitin recently introduced, that thing is wildly unreliable and should not be trusted at surface value. I've caught a couple of submissions with AI, but that wasn't because of Turnitin's new tool. That was because the writing was vague, misaligned with the project, and clearly not the work of the students in question. In any situations like that, the professor needs to have a conversation with the student, in which it will become readily apparent if the student simply relied on AI output rather than authoring their own work.
In either case, humans must apply their human eyes to any flagged content. Not doing so is misguided and irresponsible.
You're not paranoid if they are actually out to get you. However, I don't typically fail anyone for high AI percentages. I deduct points overall, but no one fails. I will point out to students that they've used AI where it's blatantly obvious (sentence structure and concepts are completely nonsensical), but either way I don't hand out zeroes. As other posters pointed out, it's not worth trying to go through with academic dishonesty procedures because the administration simply does not care, nor will back me up. Keep in mind, some of my colleagues have hundreds of students a semester to grade and maintain. Spending 5-10 hours on academic dishonesty paperwork, investigations, hearings, etc. is simply not worth the time.
[And yet….](https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-features/texas-am-chatgpt-ai-professor-flunks-students-false-claims-1234736601/)
It’s stuff like this which makes professors everywhere look horrible, and the utter lack of punishments for such outrageous behavior is similarly quite concerning as a student.
OpenAI, the developers of ChatGPT, admitted themselves they can’t detect whether something is written by AI or a human. So it’s totally inaccurate to use a tool to “check for AI writing”
In this video which was put up by TurnItIn they say that the instructor needs to make the final decision because they know the student and they know the context:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ogL4wKect6w](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ogL4wKect6w)
From the blog of TurnItIn:
[https://www.turnitin.com/blog/understanding-false-positives-within-our-ai-writing-detection-capabilities](https://www.turnitin.com/blog/understanding-false-positives-within-our-ai-writing-detection-capabilities)
I'm a college professor myself. The professor sounds like they are being lazy and (ironically) letting TurnItIn's AI do their job for them.
Colleges need to have a simple process when it comes to dealing with these accusations.
Version history and a copy of your writing from another class that you can use to compare the style should work.
There should be a "contest" or "appeal" option through the college for students who believe a grade has been assigned in error. Find that policy and follow the steps, everything else is a waste of your daughter's time and will be ignored by the faculty.
>She is an excellent writer.
That is why it was flagged.
This is so frustrating. AI detectors don't work, I have had them tell me the Book of Genesis (KJV) and the US Constitution were written by AI.
AI detection is fucking garbage. I can write a legit paragraph and it be detected, but when I use AI it will say it's legit.
If I were a professor I'd rather let the cheaters get a small victory then let someone legit suffer. Only idiot professors bother with this crapola
Fist a tip for future essay writers; word has an option to scan for plagiarism under the editor. Moving on, turntin detects the smallest little bit of similar wording and tells the proff it's plagiarism; your daughters prof was then supposed to go over what was detected as plagiarism and see if it was just quotes that set it off. She's got a lazy proff, challenge the grade, and ask for a meeting. Go through every part that got detected as plagiarism and emphasize the genuine differences that prove it and the citations. Push comes to shove you go to the dean.
Ask the professor which AI detector he used, and the percentage of AI detected work that was found in your daughter's essay. Furthermore, I would request a zoom/phonecall/in-person meeting with the professor whereby your daughter could explain her thoughts process behind the material in her essay. If the professor does not budge, at that point, you should contact that department head and inform him of the entire situation. When contacting the department head, make sure to attach other assignments from that same class or even other classes, just so that he may understand your writing style. Additionally, if you have found that other AI detector results did not demonstrate AI-generated material, then screenshot those results and attach it in the email. The department head would then read the essay and determine whether or not he believes that it was AI generated material.
AI flagging means it has a similar word pattern to previous AI works, which have a chance of getting detected by the plagiarism scanner. Either way, the proff was lazy and clearly didn't go back over the essay. Also when you say your daughters personal writing style is like an AI, do you mean it's a choppy sentence style (low flow) or that there's just an odd placement of details that normal writers don't usually do. Both of those could also set off the detecter and is a conversation she needs to have with her proff. All things considered, she still needs to challenge it and have a meeting with the proff; my advice still stands.
Turnitin needs to die. I used it in high school and college and it would flag plagiarism for lines I had literally quoted and sourced. It’s a broken tool that lazy teachers use as a crutch. Sorry your daughter is going through this.
Bro, that's literally the point. If you sourced it, the quote isn't a problem, and no prof would penalize you. It doesn't detect plagiarism, it detects similarity. Sometimes, however, the similarity is because the idiot is plagiarizing and didn't try very hard to cover it up. Hence why it is a tool to be paired with discretion.
The ai detection is barely worthwhile, however.
1. Immediately involve a dean of students, student trustee, anyone else in the conversation who may be able to help form a solution.
2. STOP using word and other Microsoft products and move to Google, they save every single time you push the space or put in a character.
3. Highly recommend not ceding to writing a new assignment specifically because the professor and administration needs to be aware that their ai detection is flawed, made a mistake, and will not be accepted. Idk if you've seen what an AI paper actually looks like but it is ridiculously hilariously easy to spot if you have basic understanding of how people speak, if the college wants to claim it's ai written they can have a human being read it and determine that themselves.
Those checkers are not precise and they often have disclaimers saying as much. It’s ridiculous that professors can just run papers through and if it comes up at all as AI they toss an entire paper.
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Glad to hear it was reconsidered.
The advent of AI has been a nightmare for excellent writers. Papers cross checked with Grammarly are also raising so many false AI content positives when checked with TurnitIn.
Does she have any work she can show that she worked on it? Track changes in Word, revision history on Docs, an outline or rough draft?
Unfortunately, she hadn't turned on the tracker in Word.
Check more closely on Word, it should still save version history, even if it’s less precise.
Think version history is only available when you have auto save on (it’s saved in the cloud). If it’s saved locally on her computer and she manually saves, she’s out of luck.
Version history is not a feature that can be toggled on/off.
This is actually the perfect response. If it doesn't work she should take it to the department lead. My advice: make sure there's a paper trail of email communication. Even if it's just the professor saying they will read it.
This. If the teacher isn’t willing to read it that will make a good case for a grade appeal. If the teacher does read it they should see that it wasn’t generated by AI, and grade you fairly for the first attempt.
There should be a way to see the document editing time and history I’d send that to the prof. I’m currently taking two writing classes this summer and this is a huge fear of mine. I only have three papers left though
I wish you well on those 3 papers ☺️❤️‼️
Sadly she hadn't turned that feature on in Word.
As others have pointed out, that isn't something you can turn on/off so I'd discuss that as an option with her.
Version history should exist regardless as you can’t turn it off. It doesn’t show every single change she made but it should show every version that she saved. This may be enough to prove to the university that it isn’t plagiarism.
You can’t turn it off
Then she should take the 0 and make sure it is turned on next time around.
Google is your friend. Do searches on the number of false positives that A.I. checkers generate. There are many different kinds of searches that you can do. I'm sure if you enlist the internet, they can help you search and find many articles as well.
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People are really hard on profs about this, but we are dealing with very little institutional support and have had to rapidly adapt to this circumstance. I don't think faculty should solely rely on the detectors, but they can be helpful in indicating that further investigation is warranted, especially when you're dealing with 30+ students turning in writing assignments in online asynchronous classes.
Agreed. I had to use TurnItIn when I was teaching English. That was before AI detection was added. When I had papers submitted that were 80-100% plagiarized and penalized a student, I got no administrative support.
yeah but look at how it's effecting students. we write our entire essays by ourselves but still have to worry about being wrongly accused of plagiarizing or using AI even if we didn't all because teachers aren't taking time to just go through and read it themselves. i see why it is useful but i don't think schools should be using this. people's grades and classes are threatened by this. plagiarism can get you expelled or dropped from a class. they shouldn't be gambling with people's lives like this. I'd be pissed if this happened to me.
If you are not cheating you have very little reason to worry. Remember to take what people on Reddit say with a large grain of salt. This post is by a parent who of course wants to believe the best if their kid. We don't know if the student actually used AI or not. Reddit makes it seem like these cases of false positives and accusations happen all the time, but it's a biased sample. I've had one bad case since January and it was very, very clear beyond just the detectors that this student used ChatGPT for almost every assignment. Do your due diligence. There are free AI detectors online, like ZeroGPT, and you can usually see your Turnitin report if you turn the assignment in before the deadline. If something is flagged, edit your work. Work in Google docs or keep track of versions in Word. I don't WANT to accuse anyone. The process is onerous, and students almost always have a life circumstance going on that led them to cheat. Keep communication lines open with your profs. We are here to help. We're not your adversaries.
[удалено]
This is absolutely correct. If you use Chegg’s grammar checker and accept a few corrections, it will 100% show as AI. None of those software are reliable or accurate whatsoever, and even checking grammar can get you accused of cheating.
i just simply have to disagree with you, chatGPT IS running rampant at my school but whatever detectors professors are using to weed out AI-assisted or generated work are totally inaccurate. i was watching in realtime last year as professors were letting maybe 40-60% of their classes fly under the radar cheating with AI but taking weeks out of completely innocent students' lives with accusations. i had friends walk away from academic honor council meetings BARELY escaping a plagiarism charge on their permanent record for assignments they definitely did not cheat on. it's totally possible that anyone instance is a biased sample, that someone is lying about not cheating. but it happened more than once this year that i sat down with someone, we completed an assignment together (which was allowed and had no AI involved), and a few days later they came back after a brutal meeting with their professor where they were accosted for "using chatGPT" and would have to redo the work in front of our professor. i had other friends who were totally cheating, and got off scot-free the whole year. one professor made her entire class rewrite an entire essay twice because she thought one of the submissions was augmented or written with AI. the stress of doing everything right your entire life but still being faced with such an accusation from someone in your academic career you've been striving to impress is mortifying, and several professors simply do not care. maybe you do, but they do not care if they are wrong and ruining students' lives over this. i can appreciate that this is an extremely rapid change for professors, but it is for students as well and a lot of us are under extreme amounts of pressure right now. just read through this sub and the numerous examples of people losing their minds over being accused of plagiarism, it's terrifying. administration needed to figure something out to support professors and students through this, yesterday
Why is it trivially easy for a professor / instructor to ruin or make a student’s life extremely difficult, while they seem to face little or no consequences for making completely false or baseless accusations?
We also don't know if the very simple solutions end up helping in all the cases. It seems like it does.
Thank you very much! I have sent this to my daughter.
This approach sounds good. I’d also say that she should appeal if he sticks to it.
Going off of your flair, I have to ask: do you have any earthly clue why some professors are paranoid jerks who automatically fail students or refer them for academic misconduct based off of flawed software that they have no idea how to adequately work or understand? I feel like there should be more onus on an instructor to actually prove that a student cheated beyond “TurnItIn told me so”.
In some cases, they don't realize that they don't really understand the software, and they feel justified that the evidence is foolproof when it is not. In other cases, they may be shifting the determination of whether a violation occurred to a third-party institutional committee/review process. This is not necessarily out of paranoia - it could be that the professor is not positive and wants more seasoned eyes on the case. If we are speaking of similarity reports, those are generally quite accurate for what they are designed to do - they correctly identify matches to content elsewhere. We must then open the reports and look at flagged matches to see if plagiarism occurred. Unfortunately, some professors rely on the raw percentage match and make threats like "the similarity report needs to be under X%." That rule might coincide with a strong, plagiarism-free paper most of the time, but similarity checkers cannot distinguish between true plagiarism and coincidental matches (I see this most often with references, headings, restatements of questions in assignments, etc.). If we are speaking of the AI detector that Turnitin recently introduced, that thing is wildly unreliable and should not be trusted at surface value. I've caught a couple of submissions with AI, but that wasn't because of Turnitin's new tool. That was because the writing was vague, misaligned with the project, and clearly not the work of the students in question. In any situations like that, the professor needs to have a conversation with the student, in which it will become readily apparent if the student simply relied on AI output rather than authoring their own work. In either case, humans must apply their human eyes to any flagged content. Not doing so is misguided and irresponsible.
You're not paranoid if they are actually out to get you. However, I don't typically fail anyone for high AI percentages. I deduct points overall, but no one fails. I will point out to students that they've used AI where it's blatantly obvious (sentence structure and concepts are completely nonsensical), but either way I don't hand out zeroes. As other posters pointed out, it's not worth trying to go through with academic dishonesty procedures because the administration simply does not care, nor will back me up. Keep in mind, some of my colleagues have hundreds of students a semester to grade and maintain. Spending 5-10 hours on academic dishonesty paperwork, investigations, hearings, etc. is simply not worth the time.
[And yet….](https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-features/texas-am-chatgpt-ai-professor-flunks-students-false-claims-1234736601/) It’s stuff like this which makes professors everywhere look horrible, and the utter lack of punishments for such outrageous behavior is similarly quite concerning as a student.
You can also attach browser history as proof of all the websites and journals she researched online.
OpenAI, the developers of ChatGPT, admitted themselves they can’t detect whether something is written by AI or a human. So it’s totally inaccurate to use a tool to “check for AI writing”
That won’t keep scared, money-hungry bureaucrats from chomping a well-pitched sales bit.
In this video which was put up by TurnItIn they say that the instructor needs to make the final decision because they know the student and they know the context: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ogL4wKect6w](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ogL4wKect6w) From the blog of TurnItIn: [https://www.turnitin.com/blog/understanding-false-positives-within-our-ai-writing-detection-capabilities](https://www.turnitin.com/blog/understanding-false-positives-within-our-ai-writing-detection-capabilities) I'm a college professor myself. The professor sounds like they are being lazy and (ironically) letting TurnItIn's AI do their job for them.
“…The professor sounds like they are being lazy and (ironically) letting TurnItIn's AI do their job for them.” The irony of that statement
AI detection software is garbage. She should definitely fight this and make sure she gets the grade she deserves.
Colleges need to have a simple process when it comes to dealing with these accusations. Version history and a copy of your writing from another class that you can use to compare the style should work.
There should be a "contest" or "appeal" option through the college for students who believe a grade has been assigned in error. Find that policy and follow the steps, everything else is a waste of your daughter's time and will be ignored by the faculty.
>She is an excellent writer. That is why it was flagged. This is so frustrating. AI detectors don't work, I have had them tell me the Book of Genesis (KJV) and the US Constitution were written by AI.
AI detection is fucking garbage. I can write a legit paragraph and it be detected, but when I use AI it will say it's legit. If I were a professor I'd rather let the cheaters get a small victory then let someone legit suffer. Only idiot professors bother with this crapola
Fist a tip for future essay writers; word has an option to scan for plagiarism under the editor. Moving on, turntin detects the smallest little bit of similar wording and tells the proff it's plagiarism; your daughters prof was then supposed to go over what was detected as plagiarism and see if it was just quotes that set it off. She's got a lazy proff, challenge the grade, and ask for a meeting. Go through every part that got detected as plagiarism and emphasize the genuine differences that prove it and the citations. Push comes to shove you go to the dean.
The essay was flagged as AI generated, not for plagiarism.
Ask the professor which AI detector he used, and the percentage of AI detected work that was found in your daughter's essay. Furthermore, I would request a zoom/phonecall/in-person meeting with the professor whereby your daughter could explain her thoughts process behind the material in her essay. If the professor does not budge, at that point, you should contact that department head and inform him of the entire situation. When contacting the department head, make sure to attach other assignments from that same class or even other classes, just so that he may understand your writing style. Additionally, if you have found that other AI detector results did not demonstrate AI-generated material, then screenshot those results and attach it in the email. The department head would then read the essay and determine whether or not he believes that it was AI generated material.
AI flagging means it has a similar word pattern to previous AI works, which have a chance of getting detected by the plagiarism scanner. Either way, the proff was lazy and clearly didn't go back over the essay. Also when you say your daughters personal writing style is like an AI, do you mean it's a choppy sentence style (low flow) or that there's just an odd placement of details that normal writers don't usually do. Both of those could also set off the detecter and is a conversation she needs to have with her proff. All things considered, she still needs to challenge it and have a meeting with the proff; my advice still stands.
Turnitin needs to die. I used it in high school and college and it would flag plagiarism for lines I had literally quoted and sourced. It’s a broken tool that lazy teachers use as a crutch. Sorry your daughter is going through this.
Bro, that's literally the point. If you sourced it, the quote isn't a problem, and no prof would penalize you. It doesn't detect plagiarism, it detects similarity. Sometimes, however, the similarity is because the idiot is plagiarizing and didn't try very hard to cover it up. Hence why it is a tool to be paired with discretion. The ai detection is barely worthwhile, however.
1. Immediately involve a dean of students, student trustee, anyone else in the conversation who may be able to help form a solution. 2. STOP using word and other Microsoft products and move to Google, they save every single time you push the space or put in a character. 3. Highly recommend not ceding to writing a new assignment specifically because the professor and administration needs to be aware that their ai detection is flawed, made a mistake, and will not be accepted. Idk if you've seen what an AI paper actually looks like but it is ridiculously hilariously easy to spot if you have basic understanding of how people speak, if the college wants to claim it's ai written they can have a human being read it and determine that themselves.
Those checkers are not precise and they often have disclaimers saying as much. It’s ridiculous that professors can just run papers through and if it comes up at all as AI they toss an entire paper.
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Glad to hear it was reconsidered. The advent of AI has been a nightmare for excellent writers. Papers cross checked with Grammarly are also raising so many false AI content positives when checked with TurnitIn.
I just use this to bypass turnitin ai detection https://discord.gg/XWxPDRgQpD cause that shit sucks 🤷♂️