Plagiarism-related tools

As a teacher, you hope you will never need to use these tools, but once in a while a student turns in a writing assignment, which you suspect is not his own.

This happened to me last week when I asked my students to write film reviews to be published in our dedicated blog. We had previously worked on film-related vocabulary and read a few examples of film reviews so that they understood the format, style and register. We worked out which information was to be included and then we started working on the review:  a first draft written in class, draft back the next class with errors highlighted according to an error correction code and a second class to edit their drafts into a final version.

The overall result was amazing (You can check their reviews here). However, one student turned in a suspicious review of the film “The Little Fockers”. When I read “As Greg and his wife Pam prepare for their young twins' upcoming birthday, Jack is nursing a heart condition that's got him mulling who should become the family's patriarch should he die. For reasons that I won't bother to spoil, Jack selects Greg who, of course, must endure a new set of tests and expectations. Greg, though, stands to ruin it all when he begins working with an exuberant and unbelievably hot drug company sales rep….”, I knew he hadn`t written it so I tried to find out where he had copied it from and, unfortunately, I was right…. 

So, after having done a bit of research on plagiarism checking tools, here is a list of the options I found and checked with the following text:

As Greg and his wife Pam prepare for their young twins' upcoming birthday, Jack is nursing a heart condition that's got him mulling who should become the family's patriarch should he die.

The following tools returned results showing that the text had been plagiarized.

Google

http://www.google.com/

The Plagiarism checker

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

Dupli Checker
http://www.duplichecker.com/

The following tools returned results saying that the work was original, no plagiarism.

Article checker
http://www.articlechecker.com/

Advanced plagiarism checker
http://searchenginereports.net/articlecheck.aspx

Plagiarisma

http://plagiarisma.net/

Plagiarism checker
http://www.plagiarismchecker.com/

Other tools

For this one, you need to sign up

Academic Plagiarism

http://www.academicplagiarism.com/

Free PC downloads

Viper

http://www.scanmyessay.com/plagiarism-detector.php

Sherlock

http://sydney.edu.au/engineering/it/~scilect/sherlock/

Tools to search for copies of your page on the web.

Copyscape

http://www.copyscape.com/

Check website plagiarism
http://www.plagiarismchecker.com/url/

I hope this brief report can help you choose the best tool for your context.