Academic dishonesty is a burning issue in universities, that’s why educators are doing their best to find a way out of the desperate situation. Most of higher educational establishments, like University of Cambridge , post plagiarism related information on their websites. Here students can find out a lot about referencing, learn guidelines on what is considered to be plagiarism and how to timely prevent it, etc. Some websites even provide tests that help students recognize plagiarism and attribute all the sources they use correctly.
Manual OR Automatic Check.
Since instructors deal with students daily and are proficient in what they do, it’s easy for them to understand something’s wrong with student works. Generally, they already know what student capabilities are and what to expect from them. When all of a sudden students change their style of narration and sound too sophisticated, they are likely to have lifted these text parts from some other works.
Inaccurate formatting can also make educators think the paper has been plagiarized.
Students might use fake footnotes and references mentioning the sources they didn’t use in their papers.
Additionally, differences in font style and its size or some other mismatches like unequal intervals and spaces within a text body is a good reason to check the writing for similarities.
Sometimes student writing doesn’t fit the assignment. This quite often happens when the work was done by writing agencies or simply taken from a paper mill. Though, plagiarism is not always so obvious, and the anti-plagiarism software is of great help here, since this search for plagiarism shows where exactly the paper might be stolen from.
Educators can benefit from using plagiarism detection tools a lot.
On top of time-saving, the checkers have other numerous advantages:
Some plagiarism checkers take great care of their users’ safety. Namely, they can be empowered to limit the checker access to all the files stored in their accounts. For example, Unplag has the "Sharing Files" option in its profile settings: When switched off, the tool won’t access newly uploaded files.
Plagiarism reports give users a full picture of all detected duplications with highlighted plagiarized areas, originality percentage, list of sources a text was copied from, etc.
One of the main characteristic features of a well-thought out plagiarism tracker is a user-friendly interface. If it’s easy to understand how it works on one’s own without support help, then this checker is a good fit for work.
Checking across billion online resources indexed by the most efficient search engines, plagiarism detectors are able to provide thorough results.
What can be done? Educataors spend a lot of time and effort working out effective strategies to prevent the Honor Code violations. Here are some of them:
1. Teaching about plagiarism is always helpful. Make sure you provide students with as many details as possible.
2. Provide guidelines on how to cite, quote, give references and footnotes.
3. Discussion is always good too. Let students share their views on plagiarism.
4. Set rules and policies. Students should know how exactly they need to format their writings and what risks they take when violating the rules.
5. Minimize risks of plagiarism: Ask students to show drafts of their writings or present their research findings before their works are completed, check a few sources from their bibliography; ask not to use outdated books and manuals, etc.