Turnitin

And so I feel like the kind of openness and invitation the book is making is modeled in the kind of circular movement of, me finding essays and bringing them to people and then that inspiring people to take it somewhere else that speaks their own experience and I really hope that that doesn't end with the book being published but that the book continues to iterate and inspire different ways of people speaking and making sense of their their lives through dress

Yeah, when I was reading Anna Wilson's essay, I was like thinking, gosh, imagine getting this through Turnitin, like you're grading assignments for your class.

It's like it's maybe the ultimate work for an assignment for university.

It's quite an extraordinary piece.

And-

Because, uh, the other thing is you have to understand, it's like we are seeing a huge thing where, like, Turnitin will tell you that you plagiarized because you mentio- Like, even if it's put in quotes, it will tell you that shit is plagiarized.

Mm-hmm.

It will...

Like, there are students who are having to fight with their fucking universities that all they did was use Grammarly-

Mm-hmm

... to adjust shit in their fucking papers, and they're getting flagged for AI by Turnitin.

Even if e- even these AI checkers cannot be trusted to tell you if there is AI.

Phrasing was very similar.

So if you've ever looked at a Turnitin report, which I have, you will notice that even in ones with very little plagiarization, it will flag lots of different parts of the report, just because sometimes phraseology is just very similar.

So if you're talking about... something in chemistry and you say, actually, I won't use chemistry.

If you're using something in computer engineering, you will say things like these values compute to this as seen in the chart below.

Anyway, Jason Arday's PhD, it does appear that there was a little bit of plagiarism in there.

I've had a look at a Turnitin report, which has been published.

So Turnitin is software.

um you know i've done a phd what you have to do is you have to submit your thesis to this software and it checks the whole thing and tells you where you've written things that sound like other people so actually as an academic it's really useful because it tells you what you should be referencing because sometimes you think things and you don't know somebody else has already thought them and written them down because there's an awful lot of work out there so turning it in can be really useful to give you another few references and make you go and read read stuff but anyway In Jason Arday's text, it does appear that there are some copy-paste errors.

So what that means is, in the original text that he's lifted it off and not referenced, he's kept the same errors in his text.

Rashida K. Choudhury from BRAC University's Board of Trustees raised broader concerns about societal gaps in practicing human values, highlighting the ethical stakes for education.

The data presented by Turnitin's regional director for South Asia, Chaitali Moitra, was revealing journal submissions jumped roughly 42% since ChatGPT's late 2022 launch and submissions with over 70% AI-generated text more than doubled between early 2024 and February 2026.

Those numbers underscore the urgency.

The Conclave featured two key sessions, Beyond Compliance, Building a Culture of Academic and Research Integrity in the AI Era, and Strengthening Academic and Research Integrity Through Policy, Practice, and Technology in the AI Era.

Professor Eaton in Calgary, remember, she's the director of the Post Plagiarism Research Lab, says that the traditional methods of detecting cheating are no longer sufficient.

You can't put an assignment into a program, in my day it was TurnItIn.com, to see if it's been plagiarized because the chatbots create unique outputs.

So we need to acknowledge that our understandings of plagiarism have changed with new technologies.

Artificial intelligence is the next wave of technology that's challenging our historical understandings of what it means to plagiarize.

and if perhaps going to in class for a little while gives everybody a bit of a reprieve from the plagiarism and it's a lot of time like you and I know it's a lot of time spent going through misconduct then you've got to show cause it's got to fit within your school's assessment policy, so your school has to adjust that in order for that to happen.

I mean, I know of schools who then went out and bought Turnitin and then, you know, the higher powers that be or NESA or the board said, oh, you can't really use that to penalise them.

So it's like you can kind of see why some teachers and faculties are like, yeah, let's go back to basics and just see what happens, like, you know.

Obviously it's always hard for that year group that's the guinea pig, right? You know, but with that being said, I do remember a time where perhaps we were a bit more lenient in in-class conditions than we were with take-home.

So- I just feel like we need to decide more around, um, you know, policies within organizations and then more societally.

Like, it's gonna be easier and easier for people to say that they think AI wrote something, and they're gonna throw, you know, it into Claude, or they're gonna throw it into Turnitin or whatever.

Yeah.

Maybe it was AI, maybe it wasn't.

But anyway...

Also companies that make things like Turnitin and, you know, respond as lockdown anti-cheating systems for online classes.

Again, as with the textbook companies, you're in this sort of like captive audience, not that competitive, cronyist sort of an industry where you're able to make artificial profits because there's much less competition.

Same thing, a lot of the standardized tests are made by private for-profit companies.