How to check your Turnitin similarity and AI score before you submit

What you'll walk away with: Both of the scores your university sees when you submit — a similarity percentage and an AI detection percentage — before you hit submit.

Prerequisites: Your essay or assignment draft, and a free academi.cx account.

Time to complete: 3-5 minutes per assignment.

Why one score isn't enough anymore

When you submit an assignment, most universities run two separate checks on it. A similarity check (the classic Turnitin plagiarism score) and an AI detection check (Turnitin's newer AI model). Two scores. Two ways to get flagged.

Most students only think about the first one. You rewrite things, you cite your sources, you keep your similarity low, and you assume you're fine. Then you get an email three weeks later saying your AI detection score was 62% and you've been referred to academic integrity.

The AI detector is the quieter threat. It has a known false positive rate. Students who never opened ChatGPT come back with 40, 50, even 80 percent. If you write in a formal or structured voice, or English isn't your first language, you can get flagged for work you wrote yourself.

Going in without checking both is flying blind on the score that's pulling students into disciplinary meetings right now.

What academi.cx actually checks

Academi.cx runs the same two checks your university does, but lets you see the result before your lecturer does.

Check	What it looks for	Why it matters
Similarity	Overlap with existing sources, papers, and websites	Flags accidental plagiarism and missing citations
AI detection	Patterns that match AI-generated writing	Flags AI-generated or AI-sounding sentences — even human ones sometimes

The AI detector is the new piece. Academi.cx claims 95% accuracy to Turnitin's own AI detection model. In practice this means if your essay is going to come back with a high AI score from your university, academi.cx will usually show you the same problem first — with enough detail to fix the specific sentences before submitting.

graph LR
    A["Your draft"] --> B["academi.cx"]
    B --> C["Similarity %"]
    B --> D["AI detection %"]
    C --> E["Fix sources<br/>and citations"]
    D --> F["Rewrite flagged<br/>sentences"]
    E --> G["Submit with<br/>confidence"]
    F --> G
    style A fill:#18181B,stroke:#FFAA00,color:#F5F5F7
    style B fill:#18181B,stroke:#FFAA00,color:#F5F5F7
    style C fill:#18181B,stroke:#636366,color:#F5F5F7
    style D fill:#18181B,stroke:#FF4444,color:#F5F5F7
    style E fill:#18181B,stroke:#636366,color:#8E8E93
    style F fill:#18181B,stroke:#636366,color:#8E8E93
    style G fill:#18181B,stroke:#FFAA00,color:#F5F5F7

How to check both scores (step by step)

1. Go to academi.cx

Open academi.cx in your browser. You can start without paying to try it on a single assignment.

2. Paste your essay

Copy your full draft — intro, body, conclusion, references — and paste it into the input box. Don't trim anything out. Both checks work best on your complete submission because that's what your university will see.

If your assignment is long (4,000+ words), that's fine. Academi.cx handles full-length essays in one pass.

3. Run both checks

Click run. Academi.cx will process your text through both the similarity check and the AI detector in the same pass. You don't need to submit it twice.

You'll get two scores back, side by side: one similarity percentage, one AI detection percentage.

4. Read the similarity report

If your similarity score is above around 15-20%, look at the highlighted sentences. The report will show you exactly which phrases match existing sources, with links to where they came from.

Most of the time, high similarity is fixable with better paraphrasing or adding a citation. You're not trying to get to zero — you're trying to get to the threshold your university accepts, which is usually under 15-20%.

5. Read the AI detection report

This is the one most students haven't seen before. Academi.cx will highlight specific sentences the AI detector flagged as likely AI-generated.

Two things to look for:

• Which sentences got flagged (even if you wrote them yourself, they trigger patterns)
• Your overall AI detection percentage

If your overall score is under 20%, you're usually safe. 20-50% is the grey zone — expect questions. Above 50% is where investigations start. Full breakdown of what each score means here.

6. Rewrite flagged sentences in your own voice

For any sentence the AI detector highlighted, rewrite it. The goal isn't to swap synonyms — detectors catch that. The goal is to break the AI pattern by changing the actual structure:

• Break long uniform sentences into shorter mixed-length ones
• Add a personal example or specific detail only you'd include
• Swap formal connectors ("furthermore", "moreover") for natural ones ("also", "on top of that", or nothing at all)
• Read the sentence out loud — if it doesn't sound like you talking, rewrite it

7. Run it one more time

Paste the updated essay back into academi.cx and run both checks again. Aim for:

• Similarity under 15-20%
• AI detection under 20%

Once both are in range, you can submit.

When the AI detector flags honest work

This happens. A lot. If your writing style is formal, if you use structured outlines, if you're a non-native English writer who learned through formal instruction, you can trigger the AI detector on work you wrote from scratch.

The fix is the same either way. Rewrite the flagged sentences to break the pattern. Don't try to argue with the detector — it's a model, not a judge. Your goal is to get your score under the threshold your university uses, regardless of whether the flag was fair.

And keep your drafts. Google Docs version history, handwritten notes, research bookmarks — all of it. If a flag does slip through and you get questioned, your draft history is the strongest evidence you wrote it yourself.

What this doesn't replace

Checking your scores doesn't mean you've written a good essay. It means you've removed the two mechanical reasons your university might flag it. Your argument, your evidence, your voice — those still need to be there.

The students who get in trouble aren't the ones who check their scores. They're the ones who submit an essay they never actually read. Check the scores, fix what's flagged, then read the thing one more time end to end before you hit submit.

Recap

• Your university runs two checks on every submission — similarity and AI detection
• Most students only check similarity, which leaves the AI score as a blind spot
• Academi.cx runs both checks in one pass, 95% accurate to Turnitin
• Paste essay, run, fix flagged sentences, re-run, submit
• Aim for similarity under 15-20% and AI detection under 20%
• Keep your drafts as evidence of your writing process

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