This article covers plagiarism cheating phenomena and suggests the tools that will help to reveal both. Also, we dive into the mechanics of plagiarism checking software, explaining the difference between paid and free plagiarism services and risks related to them.

In recent years, academic integrity has been facing challenges unseen before. The AI chatbots and tools have only added to the most common and nasty cheating type, plagiarism, taking the “good old” copying to the next level.

Educators have been dealing with students reusing existing sources for ages. However, AI chatbots generate text that doesn’t have an author, making it harder to identify academic dishonesty.

This concept is known as AI-giarism. Moreover, since AI bots are trained on large datasets and now have Internet access, they sometimes provide texts that may contain plagiarized content that has sources.

How can educators detect and prevent plagiarism, guard academic honesty, and help students develop their skills? Let’s dig into plagiarism checking.

image source: plagiarismcheck.org/higher-ed/

Why Do Students Plagiarize?

To prevent the problem, it’s worth addressing the root of the issue instead of dealing with the consequences only. That’s why understanding the reasons behind plagiarism in academia is crucial. Here are the most common reasons behind students’ cheating.

• Lack of understanding. “I just copied from Google, it’s not plagiarism”. Students come from different backgrounds and often don’t know the rules and don’t fully understand the concept of plagiarism. The solution here is to provide the learners with clear instructions and a knowledge base, educate them on writing ethics, add guidelines to the tasks, and ensure they have all the necessary instruments to maintain originality, both skills and tools-wise.
• Accidental plagiarism. Sometimes plagiarism happens due to forgetting to cite properly, poor paraphrasing, forgetting to give credit, or just pure coincidence, when people accidentally repeat someone else’s thoughts or mistake them for common knowledge facts. Unintentional plagiarism is still an academic integrity violation, so the student should be aware of this risk and be provided with the instruments to avoid it.
• Malicious intention. Some students just want to cheat the system. Educating them on the consequences of plagiarism in learning and professional environments, and effective detection of intentional copying, is the way to deal with it.
• Lack of motivation. When the task is unclear and the topic doesn’t spark interest, students may prefer to copy from the book rather than make an effort and contribute. Assignments that encourage self-expression and inspire them to share on relevant issues may motivate students to do the work themselves.
• Lack of time. Personal issues leading to time constraints, the habit of postponing work till the last moment, or strict deadlines may lead to copying instead of authentic work on the assignment. Flexibility may be the key: ensure students have enough time for creative tasks and encourage self-expression and quality work over speed. Some students would benefit from time-management advice as well!
• Striving for effectiveness. The desire to achieve more with less effort is understandable, but uncovered plagiarism brings more problems than it solves. Students should understand the plagiarism repercussions, so they don’t consider copying an easy way to cope with assignments. On the other hand, a fast and efficient plagiarism checking tool will prove that original writing may be fun and productive!

Plagiarism affects the studying process on many levels. It steals from the plagiariser, hindering their progress; decreases teachers’ motivation and adds work to assignment-checking tasks; ruins trust and relationships within the group, and jeopardizes the reputation of the whole institution.

Checking for plagiarism is an essential step that helps to prevent these problems.

Plagiarism Checking Tools

In today’s world, where online workflows and digital learning are the norm, there are tools designed specifically to detect copy-pasting. How do they work?

• When one uploads the paper to a plagiarism checker, it scans the available sources that may differ from checker to checker. Some include scientific databases or allow uploading texts from the institution’s repository to check the students’ papers against their peers’ writing.

• The algorithm finds matches of the uploaded text with the scanned content and provides their sources in the report. Modern advanced checkers are able to catch even the intricate cheating attempts and detect modified sentence structures, poor paraphrasing, synonymization, and hidden symbols.

As advanced as the tools are, it is important to understand that no software can give a 100% result. Educators should perceive plagiarism detectors as helpers and make the final decisions based on their experience and expertise. Only a person can decide whether the similarities found are plagiarism. Understanding the nature of plagiarism checking helps to set the correct standards for this helpful tool.

Things to Consider While Checking for Plagiarism

Here are are few things to keep in mind as you go about checking for plagiarism:

1. False positive similarity in text

No tool is perfect, and there is always a risk of a false positive result when a plagiarism detector flags original text as matching content. These elements most commonly add to the plagiarism percentage score if not formatted correctly:

• citations
• bibliography
• titles
• common knowledge facts
• narrowly specialized text with specific terms

2. False negative similarity in text

A false negative result occurs when the plagiarism-checking software does not flag the text that has been copied from elsewhere. Here are the most common reasons for this.

• Translation. One of the tricks students sometimes resort to is translating the borrowed material, which makes it more challenging for algorithms to detect copying.
• Limited access content. Plagiarism detectors cover different databases. If the student used material from the paid database that the tool doesn’t have access to, it will not find the matches.
• Paraphrasing. While proper paraphrasing is acceptable, using AI tools for rewriting the material counts as academic cheating and can complicate similarity detection for checkers.
• Text manipulations. Adding white symbols, replacing Latin letters with Cyrillic, and other tricks students use to avoid plagiarism consequences can complicate the detection process. While most of the advanced checkers can catch such manipulations, deliberate cheating attempts can influence the detection accuracy.
• AI-giarism. AI chatbots generate the text based on multiple sources, which are not always recognized by plagiarism detection software. For this reason, it is recommended to use a plagiarism checker in combination with an AI detection tool.

What is the Difference Between Paid and Free Plagiarism Checkers?

In a nutshell, checking for plagiarism is about scanning the sources in available databases and finding similarities. That’s how all plagiarism detectors operate. Why are there so many tools, and what is the difference between the free and paid ones?

Free checkers indeed perform the same task as paid tools. However, their results tend to be less accurate as they have limited access to available sources, which they scan for similarities.

To put it simply, the tool needs to pay for every request to the database or the search engine. Therefore, free checkers may not pay for that access, which means they miss out on flagging similarities in a big segment of sources, affecting the similarity score and the check result.

As not everyone can afford paid services, it is still better to use any checker than no checker at all. However, it is worth understanding and taking into account the risks of free tools.

For students

As students use plagiarism detection to ensure their writing will be recognised as original by their teacher, free tools may not do the trick. Usually, institutions implement paid similarity checkers, and a free checker may not help to predict the outcome of how the assignment will be checked by it. Paid plagiarism checkers find similarities that a free tool can miss.

Moreover, uploading the texts to free plagiarism checkers might result in the work being misused. In this case, a paid institution checker might detect 100% similarity with their own work on the leaked website, complicating authorship proof for a student.

For educators

Free plagiarism checkers tend to be less accurate due to the limited database. Scanning through such a detector may lead to false negatives, as described earlier in this article.

Security is another burning issue, as free checkers’ privacy settings are often questionable. That creates a risk of the texts uploaded for scanning being leaked to the network, where anyone can use them for other purposes, violating the students’ privacy rights.

With the AI chatbots boom, fighting the new AI cheating methods has become another hot topic, bringing the need to check not only for plagiarism but for AI as well. Paid tools like PlagiarismCheck.org can perform both tasks and present plagiarism and AI checking results in one report, streamlining the assignment-checking process.

Conclusion

Plagiarism checking services cannot be provided in full for free by their nature, as to guarantee quality detection, they need access to the paid resources. Therefore, it is recommended to go for a paid checker. However, if this option is not available, it is better to use a free plagiarism detector than nothing at all.

Key takeaways

• AI abuse and plagiarism are burning issues in education. However, plagiarism and AI detectors can significantly streamline the assignment checking routine and help protect academic honesty.
• AI chatbots have caused a new form of plagiarism, AI-giarism, which can also be caught by plagiarism detection tools.
• Any checker is just a helpful tool that teachers can use to make a final decision, relying on their expertise.
• Understanding plagiarism-checking mechanics and the plagiarism checking report helps to set clear expectations for educators and guarantee fair grading.
• It’s better to use a free checker than not use it at all, but paid checkers provide more security and deliver clearer results since they have access to databases that can be accessed via paid request.

Written by Jane Adelmann from Plagiarismcheck.org

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