Waterloo Turned Off AI Detection in Turnitin: Why More Schools Are Following
By Muntasir Minhaz • Published Aug 19, 2026 • Canadian Universities & Colleges, Canada Higher Ed News & Policy
The University of Waterloo turned off Turnitin's AI-detection flag starting September 2025, after internal testing found it wrongly labelled human-written work as fully AI-generated. UBC never turned the feature on in the first place.
📩 Waterloo announced the change on May 5, 2025, effective for the September 2025 term.
Internal testing by Waterloo's ed-tech team found the tool flagged human-written text as 100 percent AI-generated in multiple cases.
Waterloo cited research showing AI detectors are biased against students who are not native English speakers.
Waterloo still uses Turnitin for plagiarism (text-matching) checks. Only the AI-detection add-on is off.
UBC has never enabled Turnitin's AI-detection feature, citing the same accuracy concerns since 2023.
What changed at Waterloo
The University of Waterloo announced on May 5, 2025 that it would discontinue the AI-detection functionality inside Turnitin, effective from the September 2025 term. The decision followed consultation with Undergraduate Associate Deans, the Undergraduate Operations Committee, the university's Work Integrated Learning and Cooperative and Experiential Education offices, and the EdTech Steering Committee.
Turnitin's plagiarism-matching feature, the part that compares a submission against a database of published and previously submitted text, stays active at Waterloo. Only the separate AI-writing flag is gone.
Why Waterloo made the call
Waterloo's Instructional Technologies and Media Services group ran its own testing before recommending the change. In more than one case, the tool flagged text a human had written as 100 percent AI-generated. The university also pointed to peer-reviewed research on detector accuracy, including work by Weber-Wulff et al. (2023) and Sadasivan et al. (2023), and to research finding AI detectors flag writing from students who are not native English speakers at higher rates than writing from native speakers.
Cost was a factor too. Waterloo priced the AI-detection add-on in US dollars and concluded the price no longer matched what the feature reliably delivered.
Waterloo is not the first Canadian school to hold back
UBC never enabled Turnitin's AI-detection feature when Turnitin first rolled it out in 2023, for the same reasons Waterloo now cites: unresolved questions about accuracy and bias. Waterloo's move draws more attention because it reverses a tool the university had already been running, rather than declining a new feature before switching it on.
What this means for you
If you study at Waterloo, an AI-detection score will not appear on your Turnitin report starting from the September 2025 term. Elsewhere, a high AI-detection score is not proof of an academic offence on its own. Instructors who suspect unauthorized AI use are expected to build a case from the assignment itself, not from a single automated score.
Keep your drafts, notes and research history for major assignments regardless of what your school's Turnitin settings show. That record protects you if your writing style or word choice ever gets flagged by a detection tool your instructor still uses elsewhere.