This is horrifying but not surprising. We’ve always known “#plagiarism #detection” #software was crap, but schools keep using it anyway. “#AI detection” software is almost guaranteed to be even worse. I have no idea what to do about this, but I hope the student can get some kind of redress.
@ElemWiz I’m really, really glad I did most of my schooling before that was a thing. My dissertation work happened about the time Turnitin et al. were getting big, but if anyone ever ran that through plagiarism detection software, I didn’t know about it. Students and professors both have reason to be paranoid these days, and that’s not good for anybody. Except the companies making bank on proprietary black-box crap, I guess. 😕
This is actually pretty easy to resolve. Just set the kid down at a desk and tell them to write something.
It will be clear if they actually wrote it or not.
In fact, they should do this periodically for all of the students just to make sure they are on track.
@medigoth I know that feeling. Got badly ding’ed by TurnItIn once and it was because, while I included a citation for the source in the beginning of the paragraph, I didn’t realize I had to keep citing it throughout that same paragraph. I forget what citation format style the teacher had us using though. It’s been a while.