Anti-plagiarism Software

snorepez

At my University term papers are submitted digitally, through a program called "Safe Assignment." The program searches a data bank of student-submitted papers from other universities; internet-posted papers; scholarly articles; academic journals, etc. Essentially, every hidden nook and cranny that a term paper can be found in, this program is able to find it.

Judging from the past papers I have submitted to the program, it is excruciatingly sensitive in regards to paraphrasing, quotations, etc. And since I have a hefty term paper due in a week, and since there was significant research incorporated into the paper, I would like to see if there is any free or small-fee program that I can test-submit my paper, in order to see where I should improve my research implementation.

I have not intentionally plaigarised, and I have run the paper by a few friends for editing, but I would still like to play it safe.

So, is there a computer-program that checks a paper for plagiarism?

mooshoepork

I made a similar post the other day about another website called "turnitin" I was freaking out too, and thought it would pick up everything. I ended up getting 4% plagiarism, and that was with my bibliography. Once I pressed "exclude bibliography" I got 1%. I am not sure of any program that does it, but if you didn't intentionally plagiarize I wouldn't worry about it.

Alpine

All it does is highlight parts of your text that appear elsewhere. If you cite and paraphrase properly, any alarms the checker sets off, your prof will dismiss.

Improvolone

More students freak out about this than they need to. As long as you don't plagarize, you're going to be fine. If you forget a citation and get nailed, odds are you'll be fine. Most universities look at the student as a whole, past works, and knowledge of whatever they were writing about in order to help decide the punishment.

Again, if you didn't do it, don't worry.

Daedalus

Alpine wrote: »

All it does is highlight parts of your text that appear elsewhere. If you cite and paraphrase properly, any alarms the checker sets off, your prof will dismiss.

Well, "dismiss" is a strong word. If your paper consists of 90% (properly cited and/or paraphrased) other people's work, this is going to make that fact blisteringly obvious to the professor, more so than it would have otherwise, even if you're not plagiarizing.

Doc

One semi-alarming thing is that it is likely adding your paper to their records. I don't know if you care about that sort of thing.

Daenris

I suspect that there is probably not a downloadable software to do this simply because it would still have to be checking your paper against a submitted database, and the company is likely not going to release that (or open access to it) because that's how they make their money.

Gabriel_Pitt

Daedalus wrote: »

Alpine wrote: »

All it does is highlight parts of your text that appear elsewhere. If you cite and paraphrase properly, any alarms the checker sets off, your prof will dismiss.

Well, "dismiss" is a strong word. If your paper consists of 90% (properly cited and/or paraphrased) other people's work, this is going to make that fact blisteringly obvious to the professor, more so than it would have otherwise, even if you're not plagiarizing.

If it's all properly cited, then it's going to be just as blistering obvious when it's actually read and graded than if it's run t through software.

Echo

snorepez wrote: »

At my University term papers are submitted digitally, through a program called "Safe Assignment." The program searches a data bank of student-submitted papers from other universities; internet-posted papers; scholarly articles; academic journals, etc. Essentially, every hidden nook and cranny that a term paper can be found in, this program is able to find it.

I banned that fucker (and turnitin) from my domain. Goddamn misbehaving bots that don't respect my robots.txt.