[foxrob92]

My university used turnitin (I assume it still does), largely to check journal paper submissions and theses.

This was pretty frustrating, as my undergraduate thesis had some publishable work in it. When I reformatted the thesis up so that it would fit the standards of a journal, I still ended up getting a pretty high match...to my own work (the thesis). I ended up rewording as much of the paper as I could, but I couldn't get the %match below whatever the threshold was. Eventually my adviser said "ok, that's good enough" because he could see that I was being accused of plagiarism against myself.

[brokenkebab]

Obviously, there's a big problem with procedures in your university. The software did it job well finding what it should find, then a human should have looked at what it is, instead of you doing meaningless work of chasing lower match score.

[Nasrudith]

It seems to fit in a larger anti-pattern of educational institutions and administrative ass-covering by using "objective" rules and scores to disguard any judgement even when it is obviously and hillariously wrong.

See Zero Tolerance for another example. I snark that the best antidote to this lack of discretion is to fire the management and replace them with a minimium wage position if they won't exercise any thought.

[shakna]

I had to appeal about half my submissions to my university, because they were flagged for plagiarism against... Myself.

Turnitin seemed great at picking up my patterns of speech and common explanations I needed to make time and time again.