Plagiarism is a growing problem in post-secondary educational environments.  As students emerge from modern elementary and high school classrooms into college lecture halls, many of them are ill prepared for writing high quality, professional sounding papers.  Paper writing has always been the bane of college students’ existence,  but in decades past, students seemed more prepared to rise to the demands of a tight schedule of course paper deadlines.

In some ways, writing papers is much easier now.  There are advanced word processors like Microsoft Word for Windows and Mac, and other technological tools for helping students to create compelling and engaging work.  In many cases, professors now allow students to cite certain approved, online sources when writing their research papers;  some even permit all online sources, so long as they are peer reviewed and approved by the college.

In other ways, writing a college paper may seem all too easy for students who, under prepared for lengthy and sophisticated writing projects, find the temptation to copy and paste difficult to resist.  There are so many documents available online now, students may encounter them haphazardly, borrowing snitches and snatches from a variety of sources and thinking nothing of it — and yet, online course instructors are charged with maintaining the same degree of academic integrity in their online classrooms as they do within the four walls of a campus hall.

It is not always the case that students set out deliberately to cheat on their papers.  Often, plagiarism can occur accidentally, after reading too much from too many sources and integrating the sentences with their own thoughts.  Below are two powerful tools that can assist both online course instructors and students in determining whether a work is original, or has crossed the line into the treacherous territory of plagiarism.

Turnitin

Turnitin is the home security burglar alarms of content plagiarism. It has a  number of databases containing some 14 billion live and archived web pages along with  150 million student papers and millions more articles publications and libraries all over the world.  Instructors can use this tool to compare student work, in its original submitted format, with scores of text documents in the databases and determine how original they are.

WriteCheck

WriteCheck is a version of TurnItIn for students. This tool has many of the features of TurnItIn for educators, allowing students to double check their own work for accidental instances of plagiarism before they ever turn the paper in.

To learn more about the software and services, visit Turnitin.