r/CheckMyTurnitin_ai

Online classes feel like a completely different battle these days. Professors are watching exam recordings at full screen just to check eye movements, trying to figure out who actually did the work, and spending hours worrying about whether the grades reflect what students really know. Some are redesigning assignments, adding more in-person exams, or simply getting tired of playing detective. When teaching turns into checking videos, questioning submissions, and trying to separate real work from AI-generated work, I can see why so many professors are exhausted. Online learning was supposed to make teaching easier, not turn every assignment into an investigation.

AI policies at universities, colleges and all schools seem to be changing every other week. One semester AI is completely banned, then certain tools are allowed for grammar, then students can use it for brainstorming but not writing, then professors start adding their own rules for individual assignments. Some schools are talking about AI declarations, others are using detection reports, and some are asking students to show drafts or explain how they wrote the paper. It feels like the rules are still being written while students are already being graded under them. I honestly wonder what these policies will look like a year from now. Will universities finally settle on one clear approach, or will AI rules keep changing every time the technology changes?

I saw a professor talk about an assignment where students had to interview a real person, use the recording, and write about something they found interesting. What surprised me was students asking, “What part should I write about?” and even “How do I know what’s interesting?” That part got me thinking. If students need AI to tell them what to pick, what to say, and how to put it together, then even a simple assignment can become a struggle. Maybe the bigger problem with AI is not just students using it to write, but slowly getting used to having a machine make every little decision for them.

I’m starting to think asking students a few questions about their own paper makes more sense than arguing over an AI percentage. Not a whole presentation, just simple questions like why you chose that argument, where you got a certain idea, or what you meant in one of your paragraphs. If you actually wrote the paper, you should know your own work. But I can already see the other side too, what happens when a student writes their own paper but gets nervous speaking and suddenly looks suspicious? I’m curious, would you rather have your paper judged by an AI detector or be asked a few questions about it?

A friend told me he was a little concerned because most of the parts he wrote himself were flagged as AI. He was 100% sure he wrote most of the paper himself.

I asked him, “Do you normally use Grammarly or AI to check grammatical errors?”

He said, “Nope. I just used Gemini for basic stuff, that’s it. I also use Google Translate.”

And honestly, that gave me the answer. You cannot use AI tools during your writing process and then expect a 0% AI report from Turnitin.

These are the kinds of things some students use, then later wonder why their papers are getting flagged for AI. At this point, I would rather submit a paper with a few grammar errors and lose some marks than end up with a zero or even face suspension from school. Please take care of your papers.

I used to think a thesis statement was just a fancy sentence you put near the end of the introduction because the professor said you needed one.

Then one day she compared it to a courtroom, and for some reason that finally made sense to me. She said, imagine you are the lawyer and your thesis is your case. You walk into the courtroom with a position, then you have to present evidence that supports your case. Your body paragraphs are basically the evidence you are putting in front of the jury. If there is another side to the argument, you cannot just pretend it doesn't exist. You have to deal with it too.

That made so much more sense to me than memorizing some definition from a textbook. Now when I write an essay, I ask myself, “What exactly am I trying to convince the reader of, and what evidence would I put in front of a jury?” It was funny how that simple comparison made some changes to my writing style something I struggled with for weeks.

I would be happy to hear some of the analogies that have worked for you, that your professor gave or the professors around can share some of them so we can learn.

AI in education is becoming less about cheating and more about what happens to students' ability to think for themselves. Fei-Fei Li's point got me thinking: if a student can ask AI for every answer, write every paper, explain every problem, and even generate ideas, at what point does the student stop actually learning?

I don't think the answer is simply banning AI. Students will use these tools outside school anyway. The bigger issue is teaching students when to use AI and when to put it away and struggle through the problem themselves. A calculator can give you the answer, but you still need to understand the math. With AI, the line is much blurrier since it can produce the explanation, argument, research direction, and even the final answer. Maybe the real challenge for education is not stopping students from using AI, but making sure AI doesn't become their brain on subscription.

The reason we even did this was for fun. Our younger siblings kept complaining about being accused of using AI on essays they said they wrote themselves, so we started wondering, “Wait, what would happen if we checked some of our old papers?” I pulled out one of my 2019 essay and ran it through a Turnitin AI detector, and it came back 78% AI. Then 2 of my friends decided to test theirs too, old essays from around 2016 and 2017, and guess what? One was 53% and another 45%. At that point we just started laughing. 😂 Now I’m wondering, did we somehow have secret AI back then, or did some of these old papers end up in research data and the AI learned from them? I have no idea, but this whole thing is getting hilarious. I’m genuinely surprised. Please tell me your funniest stories with old essays, school papers, or anything else getting called AI. Let’s laugh about this AI madness together. 😂

I’ve been looking into what is happening with AI and academic cheating lately, and the problem seems to be going far beyond students simply using AI on assignments. Professors are now spending huge amounts of time investigating suspected AI use, collecting evidence, meeting with students, writing reports, attending academic misconduct hearings, and dealing with appeals. Some are redesigning assignments around in-class work, oral explanations, process evidence, and assessments tied directly to course material. Others are starting to question whether it is even worth spending hours trying to prove every suspected case. I was wondering how much this is changing the professor’s actual workload? Teaching was already a demanding job and very enjoyable, but now some instructors feel like they are expected to become investigators on top of everything else. And honestly, if catching AI cheating takes so much time that professors are burning out, maybe universities need to rethink the whole approach instead of leaving individual professors to fight this battle case by case.

I’m honestly so damn tired of group assignments. Last semester I did around 75% of the work, while some group members would add one or two sentences and disappear like their job was done. Now I look at my new syllabus and see another group project worth 40 to 50% of the final grade. Are you kidding me? 😭

Professors, if you’re going to force group work, at least put students of the same feathers together. Some of us are supposed to benefit from working in a group, but instead we end up stressed, overworked, and carrying slackers who still walk away with the same grade and they can't see any help we do carrying the name "group". How is that fair?

My daughter's fully hand-written college essays were flagged as 99% AI, probably because they were good writing. The choice is write poorly to pass the BS "AI check," or write well and suffer the fools who think the detectors work. Heads they win, tails you lose.

Hello,

Is anyone else getting sick of writing about AI for assignments? I am not talking about those little AI academic quizzes you do at the start of a subject, I am talking about essay topics and stuff.

In my psychology subject this semester we have to write about emotions and AI (worth 40% of my grade) and my psych essay last semester was about cognition and AI (34% of my grade).

Even in my physiology class this semester, we had to write an abstract in groups during class time and the teachers actively encouraged us to use AI for the assignment. She said it would be suspicious if there was more than half of the class that didn't use AI. So my group felt pressured to use AI even though we didn't want to.

I hate how much money La Trobe has spent on implementing AI into education and how much more time teachers have to take to teach us about the ✨benefits✨ of using AI instead of understanding what students actually want to learn

Has anyone else had that experience?

My essay got flagged as 88% AI on Turnitin. My prof originally left a comment saying that Turnitin had marked it that way, then later deleted the comment and quietly lowered my grade. The weird part is, I have the full Google Docs writing history showing how I actually wrote the essay, including the edits and changes over time. Now I’m not sure what the smartest move is. Should I email him and say I saw the original comment before he deleted it, or just send the writing history and ask why my grade was changed? I don’t want to make things worse, but I also don’t want to just accept the grade when I have proof the essay is mine.