Okay, I debated even posting this because IDK if anyone can help me - kind of a long shot but I’d at least appreciate hearing if anyone has any similar experiences!
I’m a second-year student (won’t say which college but it’s not Ivy League) and I’m pretty infinitely familiar by now with the plagiarism checker my college uses. If you’ve never encountered one before, the professors run everyone’s papers through them when they’re handed up to check your paper against a massive online database of other published papers and websites, to make sure you haven’t stolen someone else’s work. Not sure if this is the case everywhere, but we as students also have personal access so we can stick our papers in and it’ll tell us if we need to do some more rearrangement of the paragraphs we copied and pasted (joking). There’s a lot of different variations out there, but my college uses a proprietary one which I think is technically one of the commercially available ones with a skin on top lol.
So, my actual problem is that I submitted a paper through last night at 3 AM - burning the midnight oil because it’s due in like 30 hours - and I got my result about 20 minutes later as usual. The program sends you an email with a percentage text match and normally links you to the sources that you’re supposedly plagiarizing (my favorite is when it’s the essay template you’re using).
The email I got back about this paper was mostly standard. It had two sources I’d cited, one I’d forgotten to source, and two with such low percentages I was shocked it’d bothered to include them. But the real surprise was source six, which the program had attached to the email itself. Weirdly, it was JPEG image - like a huge one, clearly straight from a camera, that took a few seconds to load and for me to understand what I was looking at. It was a photograph of a very old and nasty-looking journal. By nasty I mean the paper was yellowed and stained reddish-brown in some places, and the binding was crusty and curling away from itself. I know one of the stains was the corpse of a bug, because I could see a tiny little wing in there. The visible pages were covered over with writing in a wide and looping hand.
What was written on that journal page, with an 87% match to my paper’s text, was:
[cut off] that he is here and when I wake he is gone but who am I to say. because it seems more and more that I am gone when he Is gone that is the dream. and what is real is the glass and him blooming behind it like gut flora always here but unnoticed. but essential. but acidic.
but like the bible says a beam in my eye. He is rotting us both from the inside by being here. But only Isn’t here when I dream and more and more the walls are glassing slowly and I can see him. there is not an army ONLY me or someone who looks out me. like me. behind all of them. redress street [can’t read this bit] me home Hana told me when I was little that she saw herself on the train and it killed her and I asked her how could she be here? [underlined] ONLY GOD CAN BE TWO PEOPLE SO
I assume it continued over to the next page, but those were the only ones attached to the email. Before you ask, my paper doesn’t have anything like this in it. I’m studying marketing and my paper is a case study of an ad campaign for a brand of window cleaner. Maybe that’s where it got the glass part from? It’s quite scary typing it all out on the page - last night I was more confused about how it pulled all that text from a JPEG file to really read what this poor guy had written. I did go back and check I submitted the right file, emailed college IT (probably won’t hear back for two weeks)…
It occurred to me like five minutes ago I should probably do a reverse image search as well, so I saved the JPEG and popped it into the engine and up came a couple of results. One was a copy of the other, which was from some local secondhand bookstore that closed down a few years ago - dead listing for a journal from the belongings of another local that was murdered (they never found who did it). I’m not a fan of true crime shit, so I’m unhardened enough that gave me a shiver. Worse, actually, they’d dug up a terrible photograph and the guy in the picture could’ve been my brother. Weird resemblance around the eyes.
I’m getting really off-topic about stuff that freaks me out so I’m going to wrap up lol. It’s 5 AM now and I don’t have a lot of time before this paper is due. Has anyone had one of these programs error on them like that before? Should I just submit the paper as is or rewrite in case that 87% text match was supposed to be for something else? I’d rather submit because I’m so tired my dorm room door is starting to look transparent 😴 I didn’t think we had one of the windowed ones but I can see my roommate out there. Appreciate any suggestions!