South African Universities Switch Off Turnitin's AI Detector Over Bias and False-Positive Risks

The University of Cape Town disabled Turnitin's AI-writing detection feature in October 2025, followed by Stellenbosch University at the end of 2025 and the University of the Free State from 1 July 2026, while the University of the Witwatersrand had never enabled the tool.

The decisions cite a peer-reviewed 2023 Stanford study finding that seven leading AI-text detectors flagged 61% of authentic essays by non-native English speakers as AI-generated (97% flagged by at least one tool), plus concrete failures documented by Rhodes University academics, including a student whose human-written work was 30% flagged, detectors disagreeing on the same essay, and a professor's own assignment questions being flagged as AI-generated.

In place of automated detection, the universities are moving toward oral presentations and defences, reflective journals, iterative drafting with in-class writing components, and explicit teaching about appropriate AI use, reasoning that these process-based approaches catch misuse without punishing students for their writing style.

This is a corrective, harm-avoidance practice rather than a proven learning intervention: no institution reports outcome data showing improved integrity or learning under the new regime, and North-West University's retained detector, with a claimed 98% accuracy and under 1% false positives, shows South African institutions have not reached consensus on the underlying evidence.