Are plagiarism softwares accurate?
This debate started when plagiarism checking solutions were launched. Students, teachers, writers, and anyone who is involved in the writing business has posed this question. Why? Because of their utter horror, they found out that blatant plagiarism was on the rise. This sudden rise in plagiarism can only be attributed to one cause – the internet.
Thousands of websites were being launched daily on the internet. This led to the flood of information becoming readily available at your fingertips on any subject that you can dream of. If you are passionate about philosophy, you don’t have to go to a library to find books on the subject; from Socrates quotes to books from modern philosophers are easy to find on the dazzling world of the internet.
Yes, every piece of information that mankind in the 21st century needs is all there. Just get on a laptop, tablet, or smartphone and browse the internet, you will find all the information right there.
When Did Plagiarism Start?
Copying other people’s work and passing it on as your own started since men started painting and producing artwork and writing poetry. The first act of plagiarism is recorded in ancient roman history. But more on this will be discussed later. The word plagiarism was coined later and appeared in the first English dictionary in the 18th century.
The act of plagiarizing is as old as time. What it was then and what it’s mushroomed into today is totally unrelated.
Where Does Plagiarism Stand Today?
Plagiarism, as we all know, is unethical. With the internet expanding from 24,000 in 1995 to over 2 billion in 2020, students learned that copying someone else’s work as submitting it as their original work became quite easy. However, teachers were equal to the task as they could easily recognize if a student was submitting their own work or had copied it off from somewhere else.
The academia was the hardest hit sector with plagiarism. Students had loads of information and could copy/paste other’s work in seconds without giving the originator credit.
In certain countries, laws were enacted to stop plagiarism. A student could be expelled from college or university. A writer could be penalized and punished.
But this gave birth to another unwanted industry, which is academic paper writers. Students pay a writer to write an assignment for them, which is guaranteed to be plagiarism-free. Yes, this practice has become quite popular among students who have too much money to spend and take a minimum interest in their studies. There are legislations in place in some countries against this practice.
Why not quote the originator and give them their due credit.
Today there are very sophisticated plagiarism checker software solutions that do an excellent job of flagging plagiarism.
The Double-Edged Sword of Plagiarism
Plagiarism is a double-edged sword. Technology made plagiarism easier for students, while plagiarism checker software solutions made it easier for plagiarists to be caught. As new technologies create new forms of expression, the rules of attributions might need to be revised.
Plagiarists have found ways to beat detection by rephrasing sentences, changing words, and rewriting entire sentences.
Tips for Students on How to Avoid Plagiarism & Teachers How to Spot It
On the other side plagiarism, checker applications have also got smarter. Copying/pasting text is an outdated mode of plagiarism when plagiarism checker technology has advanced to track down and declare a concept as stolen that will be the day when plagiarists will have to stop their illegal and unethical business.
Another facility that good plagiarism checkers offer is – grammar checker. This is a great facility, especially for those who are weak in grammar. Mixing up the tense and the use of nouns and verbs are common mistakes that we make while writing. Getting a free grammar checker with a plagiarism checker is a big advantage for writers at all levels. Let’s be frank very few of us have understood the intricate rules of grammar. Therefore, getting both a top-class plagiarism checker software that also does a good grammar check is definitely a bonus.
Plagiarism checkers should be able to rid the world of this curse – but will they? This is the question that technology experts have to answer.
How Does Plagiarism Checker Work?
A good top of the line plagiarism checker should be able to compare the submitted text with similar text stored on a website somewhere on the internet. Plagiarism checkers follow the same rules as a search engine. They also break the submitted text for checking into sentences and search for that sentence on the internet if they find a match they flag it.
But most plagiarism checkers are limited in their search algorithms. Simply stated, they could not search for similar text on protected websites. To overcome this hurdle, some plagiarism software applications are permitted by the owners of their sites to conduct searches on their databases.
This practice in plagiarism checking is called conducting a ‘deep search’. Plagiarism checkers which offers this facility generally requires paying for providing this service. Here comes https://www.plagiarismchecker.co/ in the battle of providing all such services in affordable prices efficiently.
What the Future Holds
Today anyone who thinks they can indulge in plagiarism and get away with it is living in a fool’s paradise. Technology has advanced to the extent that all forms of plagiarism can be detected and reported.
It depends on how strong a plagiarism checker you require. There are a fair number of free plagiarism checker software applications available on the internet that does a reasonably good job. Then there are the premium ones that require users to pay to use the service.
In a strange way, this brings us back to 80 AD. Martial, a Roman poet, found out that someone else was reciting his poems without paying for them. He contacted the person and offered to write poems that he could claim were his, for a payment.
The best way to avoid plagiarism is by not indulging in it, no matter how easy it may sound.
