similarity essay checker

similarity essay checker

An Exploration of Similarity Essay Checkers: Tools, Techniques, and Implications

1. Introduction to Similarity Essay Checkers

The comparisons are typically done by creating fingerprint information in the form of digests, n-tuple structures, or sequence descriptors using content hashing and document fingerprinting patch-n-gram methods. Given the exponential growth rate of the documents involved, the speed of most similarity essay software has typically become a primary point of contention or weakness, especially after considering the need to handle the load using robust, scalable, and reliable information systems that can cope with challenges of change, variation, and growth. A range of commercial, free, open-source, and cloud-deployed products are now available to quickly process, find, compare, identify, and report on even a large number of essays to the server administrators or those at the front/frontier end who make the checks, or create the repository, index, and documents that are evaluated, examined, reviewed, and checked.

Today there are several similarity essay checkers – software tools, websites, and services – that are designed specifically to look for essays that match with other content on the World-Wide-Web. Over the years, significant work has been done to design and develop these specialized tools, and software systems involve implementing and testing various techniques, algorithms, and data structures. Encouraging and supporting future research and development efforts are necessary to address the growing concerns of educational institutes at the level of local communities, districts, states, and countries.

2. Types of Similarity Essay Checkers

The degree of text-relatedness detection is a primary dimension differentiating between types of similarity checkers. The simplest type provides an activity profile of a text (i.e. the set of words used in it for more advanced manipulation: summarizing or indexing). The more advanced type links every significant word or short sequence of words with its structure in the context. Among the existing similarity checkers, WCopyfind (for discovery of real reproducible content, e.g. plagiarism), which is a surrounding text detection tool and which supposes two or three instances of the submitted text are examined at a time, provides the activity profile even though the words are not easy to recognize because the concentration is on the appearance instead of the word content. More sophisticated systems, which are widely used for generating activity profile, are expected to link words to WordNet categories. Third parties such as Massey’s similar program, nor the examined nor the reference text is provided because Massey’s program is used either for creating an activity profile optimized to detect common messages in the newsgroup or for specifying the activity profile to be an unpredictable decision sequence.

A general classification of similarity checkers can be based on the levels of the linguistic elements they process, approach, and language features they base their functioning on. Since these distinctive dimensions are complementary, a number of similarity checkers can be determined using the combination of these dimensions.

3. Key Features and Functions

Today, similarity essay providers are numerous and provide a disparate range of related services. Some of these services were clearly designed to market towards educators, while others seem to be designed for the more general audience of students. For example, Essayworld.com promotes its ability to help and share free term papers for the student inside all of us, while CheckForPlagiarism.net is marketing itself to professionals. The similarity checker from Information, Inc. allows for comparisons between the web, newsgroups, papers from other students, and book reports. Smallseotools.com offers both a plagiarism checker and the ability to rewrite essays. At the time of this writing, no free originality checkers are available that interface with files such as ppt, PDF, docx, etc.

Thus far, we have seen that similarity essay checkers have the capacity to detect verbatim copying and identify paraphrased content for multiple dates and domains on the web and precaching. These same tools can support these mechanisms, at least partially, with content in varying file formats. In this section, we explore a number of similarity essay checkers in greater detail and provide the results of a number of experiments designed to allow these tools to report their rankings of the same academic papers. First though, we briefly review each of the similarity essay checkers, and next, we examine the most commonly supported file formats.

4. Benefits and Limitations

Nevertheless, given the importance of information awareness and the increasing challenges institutions face regarding academic integrity in many countries, a better understanding of the limitations of text-matching tools can address such challenges in stimulating and diffusing interest. Understanding the mentioned limitations would guide students toward a more successful academic future and ensure that their ideas are not infringed upon.

While there are benefits to using similarity essay checkers, students should also be aware of the limitations of these tools. Students should understand that these systems can only check for textual similarity, often detect only text that has been copied exactly or with some words changed, and return similarity matches even if a reference is actually properly quoted, paraphrased, or attributed. Therefore, students need to understand the appropriate use of similarity essay checkers to ensure academic integrity.

A proposed feedback framework for the teachers’ system advocates developing “feedback sensitivity” as the focus, thus empowering teachers to decipher the output of plagiarism detection tools more effectively. A feedback loop shall allow the teacher to discern the issues and differences in similarity scores, as well as enable dialogue during the process. The study supports the need for a dialogue process and a more effective feedback layer that should complement the presence of plagiarism detection tools. Such tools generate data about similarity in assignments, and a well-structured feedback loop can steer feedback sensitivity that can evidently enhance college student learning and scholarly practice.

Many academic institutions have recommended the use of plagiarism checkers to assess the originality of students’ assignments. However, these tools often function in a one-way data flow and are not equipped to guide the user on how to analyze the data generated.

5. Implications for Academic Integrity and Education

A similarity essay checker, in essence, is an efficient and easily utilized teaching tool that helps enable the type of educational processes that promote academic integrity and a prevention and avoidance approach to addressing plagiarism. Rather than look at similarity essay checkers as surveillance tools, it would be more beneficial to view such products as a key cog in an overall academic integrity ecosystem. After reviewing the overall nature of similarity essay checkers and emphasizing the importance of prevention, different implications were examined. The natural point of departure was the intentions of students, and then, the sequence of detecting potential cases of plagiarism and the responsibilities and roles taking place at educational institutions and within academia were explored, finally concluding with a reiteration of how the different suggested implications can be practically applied and why such actions should be taken.

In the preceding sections of this study, a diverse sampling of twenty available similarity essay checkers has been reviewed, discussed, and compared, and a simple algorithm called token-based overlapping windows has been experimentally developed and verified. In this section, the question is addressed: How can similarity essay checkers lead to improvements in academic integrity and the educational processes in general? First, a brief discussion is provided on the nature of plagiarism and the importance of academic integrity. Next, suggestions for the use and management of similarity essay products are presented, with potential applications suggested for a variety of educational stakeholders.