Avoid problems with a plagiarism detector
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Aside from being a difficult word to spell, plagiarism is a serious offense that all teachers should be wary of. We’ve all heard of it, but how many of us are taking the time to check the written works of our students to be sure they are not just copying and pasting their information? For quite some time, TurnItIn has been available to teachers as a means of checking for plagiarism, but the price tag of possibly thousands of dollars turns many schools and districts off. I recently came across two new free alternatives that did quite a nice job of detecting copious copying.
The Plagiarism Checker is a dead simple copy and paste solution. Simply copy the student’s work and paste it into the website. Click on “Check the Paper” and see your results. The Plagiarism Checker takes lines of the text and performs a Google search on that text. You will then see the passages that the checker believes to be plagiarized and provides links to those searches for you. If you suspect a student has plagiarized, this is a great, easy solution designed as a project for the University of Maryland at College Park Department of Education. Here is a video about what the service is and how it works:
The second solution, which is more like TurnItIn, is PlagiarismDetect.com. PlagiarismDetect allows you to both copy and paste text into the checker or upload the document to be checked. You have the options to scan the web (default), PDF files, blogs and books. You can also choose between a “Deep Analysis” or a “Light Analysis.” Both options take only seconds to complete. The results of the scan contain information on the percentage of the document believed to have been plagiarized and the links to the original sources of the suspected text. It’s an excellent free resource for teachers to scan student work and, even better, a way for students to ensure they will not have any issues when they turn in their work. Check out the video FAQ for PlagiarismDetect here.
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Though I was initially excited about The Plagiarism Checker, I did some basic testing of it, pasting some works I know to be plagiarized, and found it largely ineffective. Honestly, as happy as I am to see programmers taking up this challenge, this is not the type of thing ones does in a weekend and it’s something many universities and companies pay lots of money for.
The best relatively inexpensive plagiarism checker I have found is Copyscape.com. It works with a high reliability. Beyond that, the field is very thin unless you have a larger budget…
Thanks for linking to my article about plagiarism detection. Out of the ones I reviewed, I prefer article checker. It’s incredibly simple and is sensitive enough to find small phrases that are published elsewhere.