Unicheck Plagiarism Detection

Unicheck is available as a Canvas LTI

Read below to see how to use Unicheck. There is a short video how to create the assignment and how students will see it. There is also a webpage with all the instructions just for students.

You can get the full instructor guide HERE

The full student guide HERE and you can view the student instruction page I made HERE (Feel free to link to this page if you feel it will help your students). Also, I made a Canvas page titled "Upload to Unicheck" and posted in our commons if you'd like to pick it up and place it in your course. You can link each assignment to those instructions for students to refer to. If you are already signed in to Canvas, you can follow this link to find the page.


To use the Integration:

Watch the short video or scroll down to see the written directions.

To interpret the results:

how to read Unicheck results - Edited.webm

How to enable Unicheck in the Canvas assignment?

To enable Unicheck in the Canvas assignment, change Submission Type to External Tool.




Next, scroll all the way down. Click the bottom option Unicheck Plagiarism Checker.


Once you click save (or save and publish), you'll see a page that looks something like this. This means that it's set up correctly! Hooray!

Configuring settings for the Unicheck assignment

Click on the settings to pull up the options for assignment settings.

Description of Unicheck assignment settings

Use this option to create ‘Draft’ assignments. Submissions in ‘Final’ assignment won’t be matched against ‘Draft’ assignments.


PRO TIP: Turn this off when students submit final drafts. It'll hit on the rough drafts and your report will be off.

When you turn on Auto Exclude Citations & References, Unicheck will search for citations (APA, MLA, Turabian, Harvard, Chicago) and references in the text and will highlight them. Citations are marked with blue color, references are marked with violet color. Marked citations and references might increase originality level.

Automatic exclusion of self-plagiarism

Unicheck automatically skips student drafts for a given assignment when Unicheck resubmit feature is used). All other matches will be reported.

When Student pre-check is On, a student will see a Drafts folder, where a user can upload draft versions of the assignment and run a similarity check. Student will see a standard Unicheck report for every similarity check. Pre-checks (both student files and similarity reports) are not visible to the teacher.

For large texts like thesis or dissertations or similar documents, recommended % value is 0. Otherwise, you might unintentionally omit relevant sources. For words filter, minimum value is 8 (i.e. sources with less than 8 words will be omitted). Set a higher value to omit larger sources.

When enabled, students will 1) see a similarity score 2) have view access to Unicheck report.

Let students run a plagiarism check on their own (student precheck)





When Student pre-check is On, a student will see a Drafts folder, where a user can upload draft versions of the assignment and run a similarity check. Student will see a standard Unicheck report for every similarity check. Pre-checks (both student files and similarity reports) are not visible to the teacher.

How do I know when Unicheck reports are available?

Open an Unicheck assignment to see the list of student submissions. You will see records for students that simply opened the assignment (Open status) and for those who have turned in the files (Submitted or Report ready statuses). Unicheck report is available when status is - Report ready. Click on a student (row in the table) to view submission details. If necessary, sort table by a column - to do this, click on a column’s name once or twice.

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All initial submissions will be recorded as attempt #1. Instructor may allow individual (recycle icon) or group resubmissions. For bulk resubmissions - select multiple or all students and click Bulk resubmit .

Students who opened assignment, but not submitted the file(s) will have status Opened.

Once Unicheck report is ready, you will see a similarity score for the submission. To view Unicheck report, click on the similarity score.

Unicheck uses following colors to represent similarity ranges:

  • Blue: 0%
  • Green: 1-24%
  • Yellow: 25-49%
  • Orange: 50-74%
  • Red: 75-100%

Interpreting the similarity results

Unicheck report uses several colors:

Supported file types

  • Adobe PDF (.pdf);
  • Apple's Pages (.pages);
  • Google Docs from Google Drive*;
  • HyperText Markup Language (.htm, .html);
  • Microsoft Excel (.xls, .xlsx)**;
  • Microsoft PowerPoint (.pptx, .ppt) + presenter notes***;
  • Microsoft Word (.docx, .doc, .dotx, .dot);
  • OpenOffice files (.odt, .ods, .odp);
  • Extensible Markup Language (.xml);
  • Comma-separated values (.csv)**;
  • MATLAB files (.m);
  • Plain text (.txt);
  • Rich text (.rtf);
  • ZIP, RAR archive (.zip, .rar)*****.

The Webinar includes commonly asked questions including:

Can I adjust the report results?

When adjusted, can I revert it back?

How to use the side-by-side comparison?

What does “hidden by privacy settings” mean?

Can I check if a quote is real?

Why do I see the Attention tab?

How can I exclude templates from the paper?.

I recommend starting the webinar at about 11:30

Here is a page you can load from the commons into your Canvas course that gives students instructions on how to submit papers.