Genuinely. As a student I don’t think I ever saw a Turnitin score for my work below 40%. There are only so many ways to wrute a sentence about the same thing, so its impossible to not accidentally plagiarise someone’s works.
I remember one lecturer telling me that they don’t really look at the % unless its something aggregious like +70%. But more often they’re looking for patterns in what it highlights.
Loads of tiny highlights with individual sources are likely to be a false positive, but big chunks of highlights from only a couple of sources is likely to be a true positive.
Fair enough. I imagine as a PhD its easier to avoid since you’re doing new research, so you’re presenting unique information with (in theory) unique sentences.
Whereas for a lot of undergrad students, up until the tail end of their degrees, they’re writing about fairly extensively covered topics, so you’re much more likely to accidentally steal wordings from others who have already written about them. In fact at that stage, I’d bet having too low a plagiarism score would more likely indicate you’re barking up the wrong tree.