The College announced to staff last month that they would be enabling AI writing detection on assignments submitted through Turnitin as of the 23rd February 2024.
The Turnitin system is part of the submission process when submitting work through Moodle. Turnitin is designed to help protect academic integrity by identifying potential plagarism or academic malpractice and has been used without issue for a number of years now.
The new changes to Turnitin mean that lecturers will now see an AI writing indicator which displays a percentage indicating the likelihood of AI-generated content, but the college has made clear this is not a definitive grading tool in their guidance to lecturers. They have set out that lecturers retain full control over assessments and decision-making.
The guidance to lecturers states that if they have potential concerns about a piece of work, they should contact the student to give them an opportunity to discuss these concerns in a meeting. If you believe your work has been wrongly flagged as AI-generated, please complete the form below as soon as possible so we can arrange help.
Other institutions have raised concerns about the effectiveness of AI-detection and the potential for false positives. Turnitin says their AI-writing detection system has a <1% false detection rate, but we need to look at that in context of Edinburgh College's 25,000 students. In the last year, there have been around 40,000 submissions from Edinburgh College students to Turnitin (not all students will use it as part of their methods of assessment) so we're keen to hear from you if you have issues.