Your students are submitting their hard work to you, and your "papers" have piled up (if you're still accepting paper submissions). How will you know if the work that has been submitted is truly the work done by your students?
Originality Reports to the Rescue
Normally, you might attempt to check your students' work by "Google-ing" sections of their work that stand out. Or perhaps you were using a tool specifically designed to detect plagiarism.
Using the power of Search, originality reports compare student work against hundreds of billions of web pages and tens of millions of books. The reports highlight missing citations, ineffective paraphrasing, or unintended plagiarism due to high similarity and link to the external source.
At this point, we should make it clear that Google's Originality Report is not positioning itself as a "plagiarism detector." What it will do is make it easier to see if passages within student submissions appear elsewhere on the internet.
This should then lead to a conversation with each student regarding the identified passages. What is great about the new originality reports feature is that students can (and should) run a report on their own assignment up to 3 times.
Educators might choose to set the expectation that students will run one originality report prior to submitting their work. Even if the teacher expects a physical paper to be submitted, students can make use of the reporting tool.
How to Get Started
If you are ready to give originality reports a try, you just need to create a new assignment in Google Classroom. After filling in all the usual details you provide your students and before you click assign, simply check the box for originality reports (seen below):
Now when students submit their papers via Google Classroom, they will be presented with the option to run an originality report. It will remind them that they can only do this up to three times for this assignment. This should be a sufficient amount of reports.
When a report is complete, it will inform students and teachers about the passages that match sites on the internet. It will also inform you of the number of cited passages.
Something(s) to Consider
As this article is being authored, Originality Reports is a beta program. During this beta program, teachers can use the reporting feature on as many assignments as they would like. However, once the program begins, each Google Classroom will allow up to three assignments that make use of the reporting feature.
Students can run up to three reports for each of the three assignments the teacher selects. Perhaps a teacher could then select three major projects that would use this feature for the year.
Lastly, please remember that this tool is not intended be used for catching plagiarism. It was designed to be a teaching tool and a conversation starter.
Want Extra Help?
As EdTech specialists, we stand ready to help you use this new feature. Please feel free to reach out to us at your earliest convenience.
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