Turnitin, the online platform teachers use to identify plagiarism, stopped working temporarily while MCPS renewed all Turnitin accounts.

Whitman’s account was accidentally inactivated by a website error, a problem that also affected at least four other schools, business manager Libby Hillard said.

Without the website, teachers had to use time-consuming methods to assess the individuality of their students’ assignments.

“I will now have to read and grade each paper and as I do, I will see if anything triggers a warning bell,” English teacher Eric Ertman said. “If any warning bells do go off I go through a boolean search on google and put a quote in quotes from the paper that I think may have been borrowed and see what pops up.”

Many students were not informed of the subscription issue, which caused a lot of stress and anxiety, senior Ethan Dodd said.

“When Turnitin wasn’t working, I messaged other friends in Lit and they were already panicking, because what if our teacher expected us to submit our papers and we didn’t?” Dodd said. “It caused an unnecessary panic.”

Turnitin.com fixed the error, restoring teacher and student access.