What do teachers use to check for plagiarism

What do teachers use to check for plagiarism

As a student you might have come across the term plagiarism percentage from your teacher or friends. This can be usually with school assignments. Also, you might want to remove plagiarism from your ‘researched’ assignments which isn’t very difficult to do if you already know which part is plagiarised.

Usually teachers/professors use premium version of commonly available tools, most likely ‘Grammarly‘ or ‘Scribbr‘.

Reasons for choosing Grammarly is fast results and Scribber is detailed results.

How plagiarism checkers work

Plagiarism checkers don’t actually check the text word by word, because it will take lot of time to check the text against billions of other pieces of text also, a lot of computation will be required which is totally inefficient.

Plagiarism checking software make use of algorithms like Karp-Rabin algorithm, Haeckel’s algorithm, k-grams, string matching algorithm(KMP). From these the KMP algorithm of plagiarism checking is very accurate for small pieces of text but take lot of computing power when the text is enormous. If you’re a com sci student you might have already heard or know how these work.

Also techniques like lexical frequencies, word-choice are also popular among lite plagiarism checker tools/software as they take less resources but at the cost of partially inaccurate results.

Common tools used to check Plagiarism

  1. Scribbr
    Generally used for advance plagiarism checking like research papers in different language. It provides accurate results as it have the largest database.
  2. Grammarly
    Grammarly is affordable which makes it the most popular ‘premium’ plagiarism checker. If you’re a student then this might be the best option. Also it provides fast results within few seconds.
    Also grammarly claims to handle user data most securely.
  3. Quetext
    It is quite similar to Grammarly in terms of speed and security but it provides better user experience with different colour highlights.
  4. PlagScan
    It uses Yahoo’s BoSS-API. PlagScan is quite popular in European countries. Also know for its easy-to-use UI and comprehensive data representation.

Free vs Premium tools

Plagiarism checking is one of few task which totally justify the cost. As the tools required to be hosted at a cloud server which is a bit expensive.
Free software/tools usually show ads or affiliate to generate revenue usually which is not enough so they don’t do through plagiarism check.

You may have found a lot of website claiming to check plagiarism for free but you need to pay for ‘deep search’ as for free one they use very small set of data.

Going with free of premium may be a good idea for local or unprofessional use as they are not too bad, but for professional use it is not recommend.

Is it ok to plagiarise?

What do teachers use to check for plagiarism

No, for legal reasons its not ‘ok’ to plagiarise other’s work. As it is not professional and it may affect reputation as a potential candidate for some work. And for students just a few infractions might result in receiving a zero on assignment.

For all these reasons these plagiarism detector tools have quite a significant importance in maintaining professionalism and quality.

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