You have taken adequate time to complete your scholarship essay. However, after submission, you receive feedback that your work is plagiarized! I know you must have heard that plagiarism is the worst academic crime that attracts significant penalties including discontinuation! Therefore, submitting a plagiarized scholarship essay will do you no good. As you seek to join institutions of higher learning, you must learn the different techniques to overcome plagiarism.
Understanding the different forms of plagiarism is the first step to ensuring you deliver original and unique content. Experts from any reputable scholarship essay writing service advise learners to not only understand the best practices in paraphrasing but also use modern tools to check for originality. Before we dwell on how to analyze plagiarism detection methods, why don’t we start by highlighting the available methods?
Common Plagiarism-Checking Approaches
- Checking manually: One of the common ways that instructors could check for plagiarism is by manually checking your work. This approach, however, needs an expert in a given area who will tell when you have copied other people’s work. Remember that using synonyms is considered plagiarism. So, your professor will flag for plagiarism if you use synonyms as a way of avoiding it.
- Using search engines: Another simple way that instructors can check for plagiarism from your work is by simply copying suspicious sections of your work and pasting them on search engines. In case you have copied, they will see from where in the search engine result page.
- Cross-referencing your work: Instructors may decide to cross-check your work against commonly used sources such as journal articles, books, periodicals, or even online sources. Again, this type of plagiarism checking requires an expert in the field.
- Analyzing the citations and references provided: As you work on your essays, you will use external sources to support your arguments. Your instructors will check whether the citations and references you have used correspond with what you have written. It helps to determine whether you have cited correctly or the source of evidence is relevant to your topic or subject.
- Plagiarism checkers: These are software designed to seamlessly check for plagiarism through the internet. The software runs through numerous databases of already existing information to cross-check the work you submit. If they detect plagiarism, you will get the results where the plagiarized text will be highlighted.
Steps in Critical Analysis of Plagiarism Detection Methods in Scholarship Essays
Academic integrity remains crucial for your success in institutions of higher learning. As a result, you need to utilize a plagiarism-checking method that would not risk your performance. Here are a few approaches you could use for critical analysis of plagiarism detection methods.
1. Analyze the effectiveness of the detection method
One of the surest ways of determining how good a plagiarism-checking method is by determining how effective it is. Reputable software such as Turnitin and Grammarly utilizes sophisticated algorithms that help in comparing your text with existing information in a vast database to identify instances of plagiarism. Ensure that the approach that you will utilize to check your work is effective in flagging any instance of plagiarism in your scholarship essay.
2. Ability to identify plagiarism in paraphrasing and citations
While plagiarism checkers may be effective in flagging copied texts that match word for word, some might miss the plagiarism where students use synonyms or change some word forms. Using such plagiarism checkers may be detrimental since they will miss important aspects of plagiarism that could end up risking your education. You therefore need to be vigilant in ensuring that you implement strategies that prevent plagiarism in the first place.
3. False negatives and positives
Some of the available plagiarism-checking tools will label an original text as plagiarized and vice-versa. On many occasions, false positives arise from the use of common phrases that could be flagged as plagiarized. Instances of false negatives arise when a plagiarism checker fails to identify plagiarized phrases and text. It could occur when the copied text is not found in the databases of existing information. Therefore, using manual checking methods may be important to avoid this.
4. Users’ security and privacy
Plagiarism checkers are mostly third parties. Therefore, learners need to scrutinize how secure it is to use a specific plagiarism checker. You shouldn’t lose ownership of your work by simply submitting it to plagiarism checkers. Note that some plagiarism checkers will store your paper in their database which may lead to the papers declared plagiarized if your professor decides to check for plagiarism with a different software.
What’s Next?
Since there are diverse methods to check for plagiarism, you must understand their strengths and weaknesses to avoid instances of plagiarism. The software makes it easy for students and instructors to check for plagiarism. However, it is always advisable to combine human judgment to guarantee 100% original work.
Also Read: Analyzing the Impact of Online Learning Platforms on Plagiarism Trends in Higher Education
