Plagiarism review - a help but no truth

Latest revision: 2022-01-31

A text comparison tool such as Ouriginal (formerly called Urkund) can be integrated into Canvas' tool for assignments. This means that if your students' work is to be reviewed via Ouriginal, you do a completely normal assignment and activate plagiarism review within the assignment.

Keep in mind that text comparison tools are not 100 % accurate and are only a support for your assessment, not a guarantee that a text is free of plagiarism or contains plagiarism.

Activate plagiarism review in an assignment

Activating plagiarism review in an assignment is very simple. It is important to know that tools like Ouriginal only can review texts and files. At least one of these options must be selected to make the Plagiarism Review box available.  

1. The submission type for the assignment needs to be set as "Online"
2. Choose Text entry and/or File Uploads as submission type. Other submission types cannot be used with plagiarism review.
3. It can be an advantage to set a limit to the file types the text comparison tool can handle, e.g. docx, pdf, odt, txt.   

1. Select the text comparison tool available at your university
2. If the student's identity needs to be hidden in the text comparison tool's database, tick the "Anonymous" box. In that case, no one can see from whom a plagiarized text comes from, which can be important if, for example, someone has a protected identity. The student's username is removed from the analysis but will still link the correct analysis to the student in Canvas.
3. You can choose when and if the students will see their own analysis. The analysis may include a display of suspected plagiarism with a display of other students' texts. 
   • If the assignment is used for examination, it is advisable to select "Never" or "After the assignment is graded". Even if you choose "Never", the analysis can, for example, be emailed to the student afterwards.
   • If the assignment is used to help students develop their academic writing, it is advisable to let students see their analysis "Immediately". The student will then get the opportunity to discover any mistakes by themselves. This will let them submit a better elaborated version of the work before it is graded.

 

This is how you see the result

A document analysis may take a few minutes, but can also take up to 24 hours. You get a clear overview of how the analysis is progressing by going to Grades. 

In the Gradebook, you will see small symbols that show how far the analysis has gotten. The result is best shown in SpeedGrader. 

 

At the top right you will see a coloured box with a percentage figure that shows how much matching text the text comparison tool has found. If you click on the box, you will go directly to the analysis.