If you are like most students out there, chances are that you learned about plagiarism and its consequences after getting admitted into a university.
Plagiarism is an ethically wrong activity in which a person tries to steal another person’s work and claim it as their own.
In universities, students tend to plagiarize books, online articles, and other web sources. They commit plagiarism due to reasons such as; not wanting to work, freeing up time for other activities, and simply because they didn’t want to fail but managed their time poorly.
Regardless of the reasons and motives, the institute is obligated to punish all instances of plagiarism.
Punishments can result in failing grades, suspension, and/or expulsion. These are all grave consequences and they can be dished out even if the plagiarism was accidental.
So, it’s important for students to check their work for plagiarism. So, here are some tools to help you.
5 Best Plagiarism Checkers for University Students
Now we are going to check out five plagiarism checkers, and how university students can use them to detect plagiarism in their work.
Check-Plagiarism
The first tool on our list is Check-Plagiarism. This is a freemium plagiarism checker which makes it suitable for students. This plagiarism detector has the following features which can help students ensure that their work is completely unique.
- Generates a detailed plagiarism report that contains the following information:
- Amount of plagiarism
- Content that is plagiarized
- All original web pages from which content was taken
- Allows checking 1,000 words for free unlimited times
- Feature for excluding a webpage from comparison
Because of these features, university students can check their assignments and essays for plagiarism. This tool is great for detecting accidental plagiarism which is helpful for students as they avoid getting poor grades for turning in duplicated work.
Study Moose
The free plagiarism by Study Moose is a great tool for university students. It can check “Essays” for plagiarism and give a similarity report. It shows the exact amount of uniqueness instead of the amount of plagiarism. Some of its important features that are helpful for university students are given below:
- Supports file uploading in .pdf, .docx, and .txt formats.
- Highlights the content that is plagiarized
- Shows the similarity of the content against each source
This tool also checks any given content against billions of web pages, so its results are quite accurate.
University students will find that they aren’t really limited to “essays” when using this tool. They can check any kind of content. Since there is no word limit, students can actually check larger documents as well such as their research papers and thesis.
Editpad
The plagiarism checker by Editpad is a freemium tool. This plagiarism checker is beneficial for university students in more ways than you would expect.
It has all the perks of a standard plagiarism checker such as checking the content against billions of online sources. It also has the following features such as:
- Exclude URL feature
- Check plagiarism in 14 languages
- Number of unique words
- Table of sources with their similarity index
This tool is specifically good for students who are learning other languages in university. They can check their essays and assignments that are in other languages for free as well. Of course, other students that want to check for plagiarism normally can use it too.
Paper Rater
Paper Rater is a free plagiarism checker that can really aid university students when it comes to checking their assignments, essays, and white papers. This tool does not require them to create an account either.
This is quite similar to Study Moose because it also does not show the exact number of plagiarism, instead, it shows the uniqueness only.
Features of the tool include:
- Plagiarized content is highlighted in yellow when you hover over a source
- List of sources with links
- No word limit for input.
These features enable students to effectively check their content before submitting it to their professors. A student only needs to copy-paste their work into the tool and click the “Get Report” button, and that will give them the report.
Grades Fixer
This is another free plagiarism checker that is good for university students. This tool is completely free and it does not require any registration either. Students can use it with ad blockers for a better experience as well.
This tool has a really compact interface that makes it really easy to use and understand. To use this tool a student needs to copy-paste this content into the tool’s interface and click the “Check My Essay” button. This will generate a report in a few seconds.
Some good features of this tool are:
- Index of similarity
- Exact amount of uniqueness and plagiarism
- Purple highlights in the text pinpointing the plagiarized parts
You already know what students can use it for, so we will move on to the next part which is that this tool has some issues with accuracy. The other tools on this list are very accurate but Grades Fixer is not too good in that regard. So, students should use it sparingly and double-check their results with other tools too.
Conclusion
University students can utilize these five plagiarism checkers to check their university work for duplication of content.
These plagiarism checkers are all accessible for free, and most of them offer upgrade paths for new features and fewer restrictions.
This is great for students as they can really make use of tools that do not cost anything due to their tighter financial situation. So, university students can make use of them and check their works for plagiarism.