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

The University of Cape Town (UCT) 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 (UFS) from 1 July 2026; the University of the Witwatersrand (Wits) had never enabled the tool. UCT's Sukaina Walji, director of the Centre for Innovation in Learning and Teaching, framed the move as shifting focus "from surveillance" toward learning; Stellenbosch's Dr Hanelie Adendorff called automated detection an "enforcement illusion"; UFS's Prof Francois Strydom said the university would not "outsource academic judgment to inaccurate, automated systems."

The decisions cite a peer-reviewed 2023 Stanford study finding that seven leading AI-text detectors flagged 61% of authentic essays written by non-native English speakers as AI-generated, with 97% of such essays flagged by at least one tool. Rhodes University academics documented further concrete failures: one student had 30% of a human-written submission flagged as AI-generated, Turnitin and GPTZero disagreed on which portions of the same essay were AI-written, and both tools flagged a professor's own assignment questions 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 (claimed 98% accuracy, under 1% false positives) shows South African institutions have not reached consensus on the underlying evidence.

Read the full analysis: https://www.itweb.co.za/article/sa-universities-move-beyond-ai-detection-tools/Pero3MZ3oV1qQb6m