Help — Turnitin flagged my own assignment prompt at 100% and now my dean is involved
I genuinely do not know whether to laugh or panic right now.
I’m a lecturer, and last week I uploaded the assignment instructions that I personally wrote into Turnitin just to test the AI detector before students submitted their papers.
Turnitin flagged the prompt itself at basically 100% AI-generated.
My own writing.
The assignment sheet I created from scratch.
The same prompt that exists in my Google Docs history with revisions going back weeks.
Now the situation somehow escalated because screenshots of the report got forwarded around during a department discussion about AI misuse, and my dean emailed asking for “clarification regarding the generated content score.”
So apparently I now have to explain to administration that I did not use AI to write the assignment instructions I wrote myself.
At this point I honestly don’t know how anyone is supposed to use these detection scores as evidence against students when the software can confidently accuse faculty of generating their own material.
Has anyone else had Turnitin flag completely human-written content this aggressively? How are your departments handling this without creating total chaos?