Review: PlagTracker finds plagiarism (sometimes even when there is none) - andersonmandist95

At a Glance

Expert's Rating

Pros

With child conception
Easy to use

Cons

Returns some misleading results

Our Verdict

PlagTracker promises to find piracy, making aliveness easier for editors and teachers. Unfortunately, this early version also points the finger at clean-handed passages.

Plagiarism is a terror of the Internet age, so a free tool to check for student plagiarization sounds like a instructor's dream total typical. Still, while the concept is exciting, the free version of PlagTracker is not heretofore reliable enough to be used with confidence.

PlagTracker works when the user pastes a school newspaper, or any other written material up to 5000 row, into a text field of operation at the PlagTracker.com site. Click Start Checking, and the avail mechanically compares the work with millions of web pages and scholarly articles. Erst a report is generated, click Horizon All Sources to see the links where the allegedly plagiarized material resides. Clicking the yoke alone may not run; I had to click the icon at the far right of the link to open it.

The Premium version of Plagtracker, which costs $15 a calendar month, returns results quicker, lets the user keep out direct sources of quoted material for more accurate results, and allows file uploads for *.doc and text files (instead of using cut and paste).

Some of PlagTracker's results may prove to be red herrings.

Can the loose version of PlagTracker detect plagiarism? Yes. I wrote upfield a paragraph and incorporated, without ascription, an excerpt from a friend's book. PlagTracker was able to identify the passing and page number via Google Books (though Google Books would not display the page itself). So that's great.

Unfortunately, PlagTracker also finds plagiarism where it doesn't survive. I uploaded a short-change (235-word) reception paragraph that my son wrote for his 9^Thursday form English class, which I am reasonably sure was non plagiarized. PlagTracker determined that 48 percent of this paragraph was "non-unique." In the autonomous version, any material that appears in quotation Marks without Sri Frederick Handley Page or draw citations is flagged on the dregs that IT is non decent cited, and a link to the original work (if it is available online) will make up provided. That makes a dependable kind of sense, but PlagTracker doesn't quit there.

For example, one of my Logos's sentences went like this: "'Mass detest existence wrong' is the second theme expressed in that story." PlagTracker flagged this line as problematic, and offered up five different sources supposedly casting aspersions connected my son's believability. Four of these were sites where people pose questions for others to serve. The first author was Yahoo Answers, where last class mortal posed this question: "I hate being outside and beingness around people. What's awry with me?" PlagTracker thought my boy had plagiarized this site based on the presence of the "people," "hate," and "wrong," words you'll ascertain extremely common on the Internet.

PlagTracker's make out-and-paste Web user interface is uncomplicated to usage.

The second source was similar—an Askville doubt this time, wondering, "What's wrong with homeschooling? (for people who hate the concept)." The third source led to a site called Answerbag ("Is IT wrong to hate midgets?"), and the fourth to UK Yahoo Answers ("Why do people detest Know-It-Alls?"). The fifth source was the Wikipedia launching for Misanthropy. Why, I cannot say. PlagTracker ISN't telling. But none of these sources had anything to do with my son's paragraph.

Some other sentence my son wrote contained the words "Parvenu Haven." Big mistake: This points to The Pregnant Gatsby, threesome different versions of it, atomic number 3 well as a tale called "Haven" at scribd.com. A teacher who is looking over the sources raffishly power assume, connected the basis of the report, that my son had lifted passages from F. Scott Fitzgerald, but there's no connection whatsoever. In this pillowcase, I would have been better off checking for plagiarism the stale-designed way: Google.

I hatred to imagine a instructor or TA pasting an essay into this "tracker" and and then acceptive at face value its conclusion that 30, 40, 50 pct or more of the document is "non-unique." All the same, knowing that this is a comparatively new project from a small team up of State computer whizzes, I plan to sign in once more in few months to find out if it has improved with age.

Source: https://www.pcworld.com/article/461653/review-plagtracker-finds-plagiarism-sometimes-even-when-there-is-none.html

Posted by: andersonmandist95.blogspot.com