02 August 2007

Online plagiarism checker

Plagiarism occurs when people steal and pass off someone else's written or creative work, as their own. It doesn't matter if it is whole or in part. This also includes reproduction of the work without crediting the source.

I used to lecture at a Public University in Malaysia as well as in private educational institutions and I was quite shocked to see how ignorant most students were regarding plagiarism. Studies in the US also show similar findings. According to surveys there, 80% College students admitted to un-intentional plagiarism. 75% students admitted to cheating and 95% did not believe they would get caught. However, 100% were caught by their institutions.

It is getting tougher and tougher to detect plagiarism, what with the so many resources available in a few clicks plus the ability to just 'copy and paste' into a Word document.

Some students assumed that it is OK to "create" a paper from different sources using the 'copy and paste' method without hardly any original content. They were not aware that we only tolerate Plagiarism to only about 5% of the total document text. Worse, they would not have any references as to where they obtained the various information from. Even with the sources provided, some didn't even bother to change the formatting when they copied from websites so you would suddenly have different paragraph formatting and different font and color dark blue as compared to the rest of the text. Another easy way to detect plagiarism , especially in assignments was when there were a few paragraphs in excellent English followed by paragraphs that I couldn't even understand.

They were quite shocked when I failed them. I explained that ignorance is not an excuse and plagiarism is really serious issue especially in the academic sector. In the West, it is considered a crime and if proven guilty, the individual can be expelled form the educational institutions.

From experience, I learnt that this is not limited to students. there are so many reports of academics being fired from their jobs or suspended because it was suddenly discovered that they had plagiarized other people's work.

While surfing the net, I noticed an ad for a new online service, "iPlagiarismCheck.com - Click here to visit us today!. The iPlagiarismCheck services were developed and marketed by Plagiarism-Checkers, Inc., a company based in New York, USA. This unique service will benefit both teachers and students (college, university, or school students) alike.

Their patented software technology is completely online, so you don't have to worry about installing any software. The software will check :
1) Internet: the software checks blogs, directories, cache as well as PDFs, submitted articles etc all over the Internet.
2) Publications: books, articles, journals etc. hard or soft printed.
3) Even the most subtle attempts at Plagiarism will be detected as they check sentence structures and word-synonyms.

All these checks are carried out instantly and securely. Right now they have several packages available starting from $5.00 for a single document.

1 comment:

divinity said...

Excellent service, I use it extensively to check all articles/documents before I submit them! Highly Recommended!

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