What is the name of the plagiarism checking machine used in Sweden?

[jackson6612]

My friend studying in Sweden when visited the home country some months ago, he was mentioning that there they have some kind of a machine and when you submit an assignment, it can check if you plagiarize, etc. What is that machine called? Plagiarism checker? Please let me know. Thanks a lot.

 

[Office_Shredder]

Plagiarism checker is a typical name. It's not really a machine, although they might have a dedicated one. There exists software you can just put on your computer that will check essays against an existing database or just search through google for plagiarism. You can look on google for examples

http://www.dustball.com/cs/plagiarism.checker/

Correctly identified a paragraph I lifted from wikipedia as being plagiarized by just taking random phrases from the input and checking to see if they are on google. On the other hand an essay that I wrote myself passed the check because the phrases it picked out in it can't be found word for word in google

 

[BishopUser]

Whenever I was in high school we had to submit essays through a plagiarism checking service. Apparently the software would highlight parts of your paper in different colors for different degrees of plagiarism. Red was a direct copy/paste, yellow was bits and pieces matching, and blue was no plagiarism detected. Once you submitted your paper it would then become part of the database that the software used to check other peoples papers (no passing essays along!).

 

[DR13]

In high school teachers had us submit our work to a site called turnitin.com to check for plagiarism

 

[Loren Booda]

This last summer the APS News July 2010 (Volume 19, Number 7) printed my letter to the Editor about plagiarism, Student Cheating Can Lead to Fraud at http://www.aps.org/publications/apsnews/201007/letters.cfm" , with some germane comments.

 

[Blenton]

In high school teachers had us submit our work to a site called turnitin.com to check for plagiarism

Turnitin is terrible. It picks you up for words that are pretty much paragraphs away to be similar. How much can one write before it is similar to another of the 7 billion of us?

 

[jackson6612]

Sorry, Blenton, I'm also an English learner, so I have to ask.

How much can one write before it is similar to another of the 7 billion of us?

Shouldn't it be: 'before it is NOT similar to'? Please guide me.

 

[Moonbear]

Sorry, Blenton, I'm also an English learner, so I have to ask.



Shouldn't it be: 'before it is NOT similar to'? Please guide me.

It was correct as originally written, though the grammar was not perfect. I think he means that the more you write, the more it is likely some phrase in your essay will match portions of phrases in someone else's essays. For some types of assignments, there are only limited ways to write the answer and still give a correct answer.

I think the idea of a tool to identify when large paragraphs or entire papers are lifted from another source is a good one. On the other hand, I would be very cautious about using something that was flagging limited phrases.

 

[Borek]

In many cases just using google is enough. Select some catchy phrase using specific and rare vocabulary and ask Google to search for it with quotes (that means - looks for the exact phrase).

Compare this search and this search to see for yourself.

Edit: well selected phrase may even not need quotes.

 

[Jimmy Snyder]

In many cases just using google is enough. Select some catchy phrase using specific and rare vocabulary and ask Google to search for it with quotes (that means - looks for the exact phrase).

Compare this search and this search to see for yourself.

Edit: well selected phrase may even not need quotes.

 

[jtbell]

Sometimes you don't even need Google!

 

[Curious3141]

In many cases just using google is enough. Select some catchy phrase using specific and rare vocabulary and ask Google to search for it with quotes (that means - looks for the exact phrase).

Compare this search and this search to see for yourself.

Edit: well selected phrase may even not need quotes.

I'm almost certain I've seen this somewhere before. Now where can that be?