[notahacker]

> This is already the case for educational software that's used to detect plagiarism. People get wrongly flagged, and then you'll have to plead your case.

How often is that the case though? A while since I've had to worry about it, but I thought plagiarism detection generally worked on the principle of looking for the majority of the content being literal matches with existing material out there with only a few small edits, which - unlike using some "AIish" turns of phrase a bot wrongly attributes to humans 9% of the time and correctly attributes to AI with a not much better success rate - is pretty hard to do accidentally.

[i_have_an_idea]

A long time ago when I was a student, I would run my papers through Turnitin before submitting. The tool would sometimes mark my (completely original) work as high as mid 20% similarity.

As a result, I have taken out quotes and citations to appease it and not have to deal with the hassle.

I expect modern day students will resort to similar measures.

[notahacker]

IIRC the marker got the same visualization that you used to take out quotes and citations that highlighted that the similar bits were in fact quotes and citations!

Maybe high school is a different matter, but I'm pretty sure even the most technophobic academic knows that jargon, terse definitions and the odd citation overlapping with stuff other people have written is going to make a similarity of at least 10% pretty much inevitable, especially when the purpose of the exercise is to show you understand the core material well enough to cite and paraphrase and compare it, not to generate novel academic insight or show you understood the field so well you didn't need to refer back to the source material. The people they were actually after were the ones that downloaded something off essaybank, removed a couple of paragraphs and rewrote the intro to match the given title and ended up with 80%+ similarity