Turnitin thinks I cheated because I actually listened in class. 🙃
So I am that person who sits front row with three pens and a water bottle like it's a sport. I record lectures, timestamp key points, and type my notes verbatim when the professor is moving fast so I can study later. Today I submitted a short-response assignment that was basically a synthesis of my notes plus my own examples. Turnitin came back with a 48 percent match. The big chunks that matched were phrases lifted directly from my lecture notes - which, apparently, are identical or nearly identical to the lecture slides our professor uses each week.
I get it - if the phrase on the slide is “mitochondria are the site of oxidative phosphorylation,” there are only so many ways to say that. But I also used very specific bullet points he had on the slide, like the names of the complexes and their order, and I kept the phrasing because I wanted to be precise for the definition section of the prompt. Now my professor emailed me asking to explain the high similarity. He did not accuse me of plagiarism outright, but the subject line “Academic Integrity Concern” made my stomach jump into my throat.
The irony is I did the reading, went to lecture, and the only source I referenced while writing was my own notes. I feel weirdly punished for my memory - like the better I am at recalling the exact language, the more suspicious I look. I am not trying to pass off his slides as my original thought - I was trying to be accurate with content that does not have a lot of wiggle room in terms of wording.
Is this one of those situations where I should have cited the lecture slides even for short responses? Do professors expect us to paraphrase even the technical stuff? I honestly do not know how to reword some of these terms without making them wrong. I am anxious that the “similarity” is going to stick to my record when the content is just me taking detailed notes. Anyone been through this and survived?