Have you ever been falsely accused of plagiarism?

Only by a program I used in college to submit coursework online. This was not my first semester taking online courses, but it was a new program our school started using, so I was not too familiar with how it worked.

Usually when submitting a paper, it was not unheard of for the program to note that something like 4–7% of your work had been used in someone else’s work. The program was kind enough to highlight these areas of concern and it was almost always because of quotes used and references cited.

I was very much taken aback when the program indicated that 14% of a test I submitted was not my original work. That number seemed high enough to get me in hot water, and I immediately scanned through essay portions of the test to view the highlight areas of my work to see what could be the problem. Only my essays were fine, there wasn’t very many words highlighted, so I checked out the rest of the test.

It turns out the program was picking up the questions themselves and the multiple choice answers that were on the test and counting that as plagiarized material.

I emailed my professor and she was very understanding about the situation. She laughed it off and let the whole class know that the percentages we were getting were normal, and to not to worry about it.