Avoid Plagiarism With the New Google Assignments Tool
This year, Google is helping teachers fight scammers and helping students make sure they don’t accidentally copy someone else’s work.
On Wednesday, Google announced Assignments , an updated version of its CourseKit software.
At a basic level, the software allows teachers to create new assignments that they send to students in the classroom, giving each student a unique copy of the assignment.
For example, an English professor might send out an assignment asking students to write a book report on Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet. When a student writes this report, they can create a report on the originality of their final product to make sure they haven’t accidentally borrowed someone else. After submission, teachers can run the same report so they know if the report was copied in whole or in part, and where it was copied from.
The content of the newspaper will be checked against “hundreds of billions of web pages” as well as “tens of millions of books.”
The idea is that students may forget to correctly quote a certain part of their work, so this gives them a chance to fix the problem before their teacher hurts them. Students can only run a report three times on one sheet, so it cannot be used for proofreading until the article no longer triggers any red flags.
When a student submits something, Assignments automatically makes it so that the student can no longer edit the article, and also cannot revoke the teacher’s access.
During grading, teachers can comment on reports digitally, just like you can comment on traditional Google documents. These comments can also be two-way, so the student can answer the teacher’s question directly in the comments.