Katherine Pickering Antonova, a history professor, initially found plagiarism detection tools like Turnitin and SafeAssign promising for academic integrity. However, she soon discovered these tools primarily flag matching text rather than actual plagiarism, which is a subjective assessment. This led to frustrations over false positives and the unnecessary workload of verifying flagged passages. Having abandoned these tools after a couple of years, Antonova asserted that they are more harmful than helpful. Similar issues were noted in the high-profile case of Claudine Gay, where flagged writing samples resulted in significant reputational damage.
It's not tracking plagiarism at all; it's just flagging matching text. Those two concepts have different standards; plagiarism is a subjective assessment of misconduct.
The bots are literally worse than useless. They do harm, and they don't find anything I couldn't find by myself.
As at many colleges throughout the country, scanning for plagiarism in submitted assignments is the default, but the tools often lead to false flags.
Claudine Gay, a widely respected political scientist, became the latest victim of this technology, being forced to step down due to flagged examples of plagiarism.
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