iPlagiarismCheck.com Review
August 7, 2007 Posted by Tyler CruzThe following is a paid review and is completely of my own opinion and is not influenced by being paid. If you’re interested in having me review your site or product, you can purchase a review from me through PayPerPost by clicking on the PayPerPost Direct button located at the top left of my blog.
WARNING: the following site may instill pure fear into the minds of cheating students everywhere. Reader discretion is advised.
I read online recently, I believe it was CNN, that cheating is rampant in college and universities these days. I forget the
exact numbers, but I believe it was somewhere around 55-60% of students that cheat.
This does not surprise me. I can easily remember back in high school (since I never went to college) how many kids cheated. And as the Internet continues to grow, so does the numebr of sites that actually sell pre-written essays and reports.
This must be quite an issue for teachers and professors – it’s time-consuming enough as it is for them to simply mark and critique written work, let alone try to check for plagiarism. I’m sure that some teachers do a few quick Google queries on some suspicious essays, but as good as Google is, it’s still built for basic keywords, not entire paragraphs.
This is where the use for a site such as iPlagiarismCheck.com comes in. iPlagiarismCheck is a service that scans documents to check for plagiarised material.
How it Works
Users must first choose a package to choose from because, while affordable, the service is not free. Once paid for, users simply submit the document or documents they want scanned. The time it takes to receive the results depends on the current queue and how busy they currently are, and the number and size of the documents you wish to scan.
Their software checks document text using various patented approaches, including:
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The Internet: blogs, directories, cache as well as PDFs, submitted articles etc.
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Hard Print Publications: books, articles, journals etc.
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Patented Algorithm: checks sentence structures and word-synonyms to root out even the most subtle attempts at plagiarism.
After the scanning is complete, you’ll then be e-mailed a URL which states the report of your documents.
For the purpose of this review, I created two sample plagiarised reports. The first was from a friend’s book which is pending publishing, and a plagiarised paragraph taken from an e-newsletter. I received the results about an hour later, and it turned up empty; it didn’t discover the plagiarised paragraph!
My assumption was that it could not detect the plagiarized paragraph because it was taken from a private source; the newsletter was sent through a subscribed e-mail list.
Thus, I created a second document. It was a review of the movie The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy. I “stole” a couple paragraphs from one of the review from Movie-Vault.com and sent it in for scanning. 5-10 minutes later I received the results: I was caught!
iPlagiarismCheck.com caught both paragraphs and even linked me to the direct source of where I had copied it from.
So, their software works, but it isn’t fail-safe. It cannot scan against private data such as e-newsletters. However, it could still be a useful tool to help teachers and professors crack down on the majority of plagiarism attempts, especially considering most people who cheat aren’t that bright anyway.
The Website
This review is already getting much too long, but I’d like to offer a couple of quick constructive critisisms. Their site, in both MSIE 7.0 and FireFox, does not render properly. I see overlapped paragraphs and images, a massive space gap at the “bottom” of the site, and then difficult-to-read text at the bottom of the site
Site design and usability is less important on sites such as this that offer a basic service, but the design looks like it was crafted from a prepurchased template, or else created by an amateur web design company. I would highly recommend for them to strongly consider getting their site redone by a professional. I know they have the budget for it.
Pricing
As stated above, iPlagiarismCheck.com isn’t free, but their prices are reasonable. As per their prices page a single document scan is priced at $5, 5 scans at $25, unlimited monthly scans at $35, and yearly unlimited scans at $65.
Conclusion
iPlagiarismCheck.com isn’t a fail-safe solution to finding plagiarised material, but it certainly does work to a decent degree and should prove to be a valuable tool for teachers and professors trying to crack down on their cheating students.
Wow. They are really having rendering issues. The two floats are bearable but what is all that junk at the… deep bottom? It actually looks like a mild case of keyword stuffing.
The BIGGEST thing iPlagiarismCheck needs to do is employ a TABLELESS CSS DESIGN and WEB STANDARDS. It’s pretty obvious their table layout is made in some sort of WYSIWYG design editor. Check out their source code, especially where the keyword stuffing is spaced down to the bottom with a column .
In fact, reanalyzing the source code, I think they just used the WYSIWYG FrontPage editor.
Anyhow, most highschools use TurnItIn.com. Apparently iPlagCheck is trying to break into the market. They’d be a taken more seriously if they could fix their design. I hope they didn’t pay for that horrible FrontPage mashup.
EDIT:
…with a column of
(Hopefully the code tag works)
[…] Upon doing my research for this review, I couldn’t help but feel a sense of déjà vu. Almost exactly a year ago, I did a paid review of iPlagiarismCheck.com. […]