In colleges and universities, written essays and assignments contribute significantly to students’ grades. However, most written papers afford them a poor grade due to plagiarism issues.
Whether plagiarism is done deliberately or unintentionally, it is considered a colossal offense. Plagiarism can lead to suspension or expulsion.
It can even lead to legal tussles that require you to heavily spend your money. This form of academic dishonesty can destroy your academic life completely.
As serious as the offense might look, do colleges check every essay for plagiarism?
Read through to learn more about plagiarism and its consequences and ways to avoid this offense.
Do Colleges Check Every Essay for Plagiarism?
Colleges check every essay for plagiarism and penalize students whose work appears to be plagiarized. Every college may allow a different similarity and plagiarism score, but they cross-check every submitted essay for plagiarism.
Through Application Programming Interfaces (APIs), colleges and universities integrate plagiarism checking software in their systems.
These institutions buy the software’s licenses to be applied by all their departments.
Instructors can, therefore, conveniently check for plagiarism in the submitted assignments and essays.
It is important to note that checking for plagiarism using effective automated software such as Turnitin, Unicheck, and Safe Assign is very fast.
Instructors can pass through multiple essays in this software to check for plagiarism and spend a minimal amount of time. Therefore, they make sure to check every piece for plagiarism.
Also see: Can my teacher tell if I copy-paste?
Can You Get in Trouble for Plagiarizing an Essay?
You will get into trouble if you plagiarize an essay. Plagiarism becomes cheating and, therefore, unlawful in all colleges and universities.
The severity of penalization will depend on an institution’s plagiarism policies and the type of plagiarism. However, plagiarism is still considered a severe offense, and punishment is almost a guarantee.
If you plagiarize accidentally and lack any previous record of similarity issues, your instructor may not severely penalize you.
The lecturer might tutor you about your errors, and trim down your grade, sometimes to even fail. Placement on disciplinary probation is too a possible penalty.
The kinds of punishment inflicted for deliberate plagiarism are usually severe. Intentional plagiarism occurs when you directly copy another person’s work or rephrase it without correctly referencing or citing the work.
Some of the severe repercussions you could undergo for intentional plagiarism include; suspension or expulsion from the college or university, a ruined individual and institution reputation, legal repercussions, monetary repercussions, or revocation of your degree.
It is vital to note that plagiarism is unethical whether you are a student, an employee, or a professional working in any field involving writing essays, assignments, or articles.
Plagiarism is proof of dishonesty, cheating, and laziness. Be prepared for the consequences if you are caught plagiarizing.
Tools Universities Use to Check for Plagiarism in Essays
As it has been repetitively put in this piece, plagiarism is unethical, unprofessional, and unlawful.
Due to these reasons, academic institutions, primarily universities, are incredibly keen to screen submitted essays from their students to detect any instances of plagiarism.
Universities have previously been faced with the challenge of screening multiple essays within a short period.
However, with the introduction of the internet, instructors and universities have adopted different tools in their systems to save them time and trouble.
These tools include:
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Turnitin
Turnitin is the most used tool among universities and colleges.
This tool provides an encyclopedic insight into your paper because it yields your essay’s percentage similarity index score against already written articles.
A 15 percent and below similarity score indicates that your essay is not plagiarized. However, a similarity score of 25 percent and above shows high levels of plagiarism, which can land you in trouble.
Also see: What Turnitin checks and doesn’t check
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SafeAssign
SafeAssign is a simple to use tool that instructors use to compare the essays students submit against other already written papers.
This tool compares the essays against other essays written by students from that university or other universities.
Additionally, it compares them against journals from the wider internet.
Lecturers and other instructors can effectively use this tool to teach their students about plagiarism and how to cite sources correctly.
Also see: Does SafeAssign Check Previously Submitted Papers?
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Copyleaks
This tool is one of the best software that university lecturers use to check for plagiarism in submitted essays.
Copyleaks spends the least amount of time checking plagiarism in multiple papers, therefore instructors spend minimum time passing assignments through this tool.
Copyleaks can be used with multiple languages, different file formats, and can be accessed by all devices.
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Unicheck
More than 500 academic institutions employ Unicheck to detect similarities and poor referencing in essays.
This tool employs an algorithm to detect and highlight plagiarized parts of the paper within a short period.
Lecturers often use Unicheck because of its ability to check multiple essays at the same time.
Also see: How to beat unicheck
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Plagium
Plagium is a widely used software by academic institutions to detect duplicated content in submitted essays. It is a fast software that can be accessed from all devices.
Plagium’s vital features include file comparison, deep search, and it supports many file formats.
Additionally, this tools supports languages such as French, English, Portuguese, and Spanish,
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PlagScan
PlagScan is an effective tool utilized by over 1500 institutions, most of which are universities and colleges.
This tool is thorough in picking out plagiarized and wrongly paraphrased content in essays and articles.
PlagScan compares your work with millions of previously written scientific journals, web documents, articles, and essays.
PlagScan is one of the most authentic plagiarism detecting tools.
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Plagramme
Its users consider Plagramme as the most accurate plagiarism checking software.
This tool shows the plagiarized content in your essay, wrong citations, and poor paraphrasing. Additionally, Plagramme detects even the slightest forms of plagiarism and switching of phrases.
This tool employs color codes to pick out plagiarized parts of your essay.
This feature enables you to make the necessary corrections before submitting your work.
Tips to Beat Tools Used by universities to Check for Plagiarism
As a student, submitting plagiarized papers is usually a nightmare, which should be avoided by all means.
Below is a list of tips to guide you in effectively beating tools that universities use to check for plagiarism.
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Paraphrase your content thoroughly
Paraphrasing means converting a text into your own words to make the work original. Paraphrasing is done through the use of synonyms and sentence structuring.
When you paraphrase your content correctly, no plagiarism checking tool will detect plagiarism in your work.
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Change the format of your document
This trick is done by altering the internal structure of your paper from Word to PDF. You change the characters in the text layer and beat most tools. This tool is ineffective when you are required to submit your work in .doc format.
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Hire an online essay writer
Online writers are effective in delivering unique and quality papers within a short time.
If you don’t have adequate writing skills or time, hiring an online essay writer is your best option to avoid plagiarism.
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Add images to your work.
It becomes challenging for plagiarism-checking tools to trace similarities in papers that contain both texts and pictures.
Include graphs, maps, and photos in your document to make your writing appealing and plagiarism-free.
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Cite your sources correctly
Cite a reference if you use wordings from that source in your text. This tip helps you confirm that the used words are not your own, and hence you avoid plagiarism.
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Translate your work into a different language
Most plagiarism detecting software uses English as their primary language. Changing the alphabets to Cyrillic and Latin will make your piece unique and plagiarism-free.
Conclusion
As clearly explained in this article, plagiarism is a severe blunder worth wrecking your academic journey.
Therefore, you need to make sure you avoid plagiarism at all costs before submitting your work.
That said, do colleges check every essay for plagiarism?
Yes, they do, as such, it is important to make sure that all essays and papers submitted are plagiarism-free and properly cited.