What Does the Turntin AI Report Asterisk (*) Mean?

TL;DR: It means that in the Turnitin AI report you generated, you got an AI score below 20%, and Turnitin sees your text as “human-written”.

It’s 1 AM. You’ve just uploaded your thesis to the UM or USM or your whatever university’s web portal. You wait for the processing bar to finish spinning. You are praying for a low number. Maybe 15%? 10%? You used AI to help you brainstorm and write a layout for your work. But you manually humanized the majority of the AI text, expecting a very low AI score.

But when the report loads, you don’t see a number.

You see a tiny, mysterious Asterisk (*).

Panic sets in. Is the file broken? Did the AI crash? Is this a “red flag” that means you’re about to be called in for a hearing?

Stop. Take a breath.

In the high-stakes world of 2026 academic submissions, that little star is arguably the best result you can get. It doesn’t mean your file is corrupted. It doesn’t mean you’re in trouble.

It means you actually got a good score on the Turnitin report!

Here is the simple, human truth about why Turnitin hides your score behind an asterisk, and how to explain this “non-result” to a confused supervisor.

The 20% “Safety Buffer”: What the Star Actually Means

Since the major update in mid-2024 (which is still the standard today), Turnitin introduced a “False Positive Buffer.” Here is the logic: differentiating between “human writing” and “AI writing” is incredibly messy at low volumes. A 4% score is often just “statistical noise”, or random sentences that look like AI but are actually just formal academic phrasing. Because sometimes it is actually hard for the detector to differentiate between a well written formal, academic text and AI generated text. Why? Well we all know that academic text is highly dry and formal, and this makes it inevitable to sometimes overlap with the tone of AI generated content. Below is a screenshot of what it looks like on the report.

So, Turnitin made a decision. If your AI score is below 20%, they hide it.

1. They hide the percentage. Instead of “12%” or “8%,” you get an asterisk (*).
2. They hide the highlights. The report looks clean. No glowing sentences. No red flags.

Turnitin’s engineers realized that showing a 6% score just makes professors paranoid. It leads to false accusations over a single sentence in your Methodology. So, they suppress it.

The asterisk is effectively a “Safe Pass.” It is the system saying: “We found trace amounts of patterns, but not enough to prove anything. So, we are treating this document as 100% human.”

The “Invisible Shield”

Think of the asterisk as a shield.

Without it, a strict lecturer might see a 4% AI Score, click into the report, find one highlighted sentence in your Introduction, and demand a rewrite. It happens all the time.

With the asterisk, that 4% is invisible. The lecturer sees no highlights. They see no number. Your work is presumed original. You are safe.

The Problem: When Supervisors Don’t Get It

The software isn’t the issue. Humans are.

Many supervisors at Malaysian universities, especially the old-school ones, are used to the “Old Turnitin.” They want to see a number. When they see a symbol, they get suspicious.

• “Is the system broken?”
• “Did the student use a white-text hack to hide the score?”
• “I need them to resubmit until I see a Zero.”

Here is how you handle that conversation.

Don’t apologize. Educate. If your supervisor questions the asterisk, you can politely explain:

“The asterisk actually indicates that the AI likelihood is negligible (less than 20%). Turnitin automatically suppresses these low scores to prevent false accusations based on statistical noise. It effectively means the manuscript has passed the AI check with a ‘clean’ status.”

Important: Asterisk (*) vs. “Unavailable”

Be careful. Do not confuse the asterisk with an “AI Detection Unavailable” message. They look similar, but one is a pass, and the other is a fail.

• The Asterisk (*): Score is <20%. The document is valid. Celebrate.
• Gray Icon / “Unavailable”: The file failed the technical requirements (e.g., file size >100MB, <300 words, or wrong format). Fix the file. You must resubmit.
• “–” (Dash): The report is still thinking. Wait. Go get a coffee.

Summary: The “Green Light” in Disguise

If you open your report and see that tiny star, don’t email IT support.

It means your efforts to write authentically, or to properly humanize your drafts, have worked. You are in the safe zone where the algorithm admits it cannot distinguish your work from that of a human scholar. So if you get an asterisk, congradulations, your academic text is AI-free!

Read more on Effectively Humanizing AI Content

Read more on how the Turnitin AI Checker works