Saturday 18 June 2011

Plagiarism-related tools


As a teacher, you hope you will never need to use these tools, but once in a while a student turns in a writing assignment, which you suspect is not his own.


This happened to me last week when I asked my students to write film reviews to be published in our dedicated blog. We had previously worked on film-related vocabulary and read a few examples of film reviews so that they understood the format, style and register. We worked out which information was to be included and then we started working on the review:  a first draft written in class, draft back the next class with errors highlighted according to an error correction code and a second class to edit their drafts into a final version.


The overall result was amazing (You can check their reviews here). However, one student turned in a suspicious review of the film “The Little Fockers”. When I read “As Greg and his wife Pam prepare for their young twins' upcoming birthday, Jack is nursing a heart condition that's got him mulling who should become the family's patriarch should he die. For reasons that I won't bother to spoil, Jack selects Greg who, of course, must endure a new set of tests and expectations. Greg, though, stands to ruin it all when he begins working with an exuberant and unbelievably hot drug company sales rep….”, I knew he hadn`t written it so I tried to find out where he had copied it from and, unfortunately, I was right…. 

So, after having done a bit of research on plagiarism checking tools, here is a list of the options I found and checked with the following text:

As Greg and his wife Pam prepare for their young twins' upcoming birthday, Jack is nursing a heart condition that's got him mulling who should become the family's patriarch should he die.

The following tools returned results showing that the text had been plagiarized.

Google



The Plagiarism checker






The following tools returned results saying that the work was original, no plagiarism.




Advanced plagiarism checker
http://searchenginereports.net/articlecheck.aspx

Plagiarisma

Other tools

For this one, you need to sign up
Academic Plagiarism

Free PC downloads
Viper

Sherlock


Tools to search for copies of your page on the web.
Copyscape

Check website plagiarism
http://www.plagiarismchecker.com/url/



I hope this brief report can help you choose the best tool for your context.

5 comments:

  1. Hi Vicky,
    Thanks very much for sharing this great set of tools, and sorry that you had to find them this way.
    What did you do after you'd discovered that the student had plagiarised? My instinct would be to print off/email the original source and give it to the student along with their copy, then discuss why plagiarism is a bad idea, then ask for the student to resubmit.
    Thanks,
    Sandy

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  2. Hi, Sandy,

    That's exactly what I am going to do (as I haven't seen him yet). I am also going to discuss plagiarism in general with the class from an ethical point of view.

    Thanks for commenting!

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  3. Vicki
    While I teach 4th grade and am introducing the concept of plagiarism. Appreciate your posting of this tech. I plan to share this with several of my coworkers in the middle school. It is so important in today's current technology that authors receive the credit that is due for their work. Students need to learn to site information correctly and know that there are consequences for claiming others work as their own.

    Josh619

    ReplyDelete
  4. Hi Vicky,

    I've been through this uncomfortable experience with my online English learners a few times. I decided to establish a Plagiarism Pledge! Many of the students in my writing group have taken it. We also created a resource on English Club to help learners understand what plagiarism is. How to Avoid Plagiarism: http://www.englishclub.com/writing/plagiarism.htm

    Cheers,
    Tara

    ReplyDelete