Google Classroom's Originality Checker: A Free Alternative to Turnitin (Full Transcript)

Speaker 1: Google Classroom features an originality checker similar to Turnitin, which teachers can leverage on assignments collected in Classroom. It's an excellent free alternative, but it is not exactly like Turnitin, so I will point out a couple differences as we go. To get started, create a new assignment or edit one of your existing ones. Put a checkmark in the box next to Originality Reports. When I do so, I'm notified that I can enable originality reports on only three assignments per class, since I have the basic Google Suite for Education. Organizations that have upgraded to Google Suite Enterprise have unlimited originality reports per class. Since I already have one assignment that I've used the originality checker with in this class, I only have two left. I have tried deleting an old assignment to see if I can free up one of those three slots, but I was unsuccessful if any student submissions had been made to the assignment. Let's see this from a student's view. Students visit the assignment like any other, but this originality reports available message cues them that the teacher has enabled this feature. Students select their submission, just like they always do, but before they turn it in, they can run and view their originality report, unlike Turnitin, which withholds the originality report until the student has formally turned their work in. When you turn on originality reports for an assignment, students can run the report up to three times before they submit their work, and teachers will not be able to see the report students run prior to submission. After students run their originality reports, they can continue to improve their work before submitting the assignment. I'll view this originality report as a student. Now I intentionally copied and pasted chunks of this essay from online sources, and my originality report clearly shows that. Students can view flagged passages by count, or percentage of paper, and directly quoted passages can be toggled on or off. My paper doesn't have any quoted passages, so my toggle option is grade out. This information on flagged passages hopefully prompts the student to make revisions, cite their sources, and paraphrase instead of copy pasting, and the student has the opportunity to enter editing mode right from here to make those revisions, or they can close the tab and submit their work. Let's switch back to teacher view and view the assignment submissions. Teachers must click on the student's submission to view the originality information for the submission. Unlike Turnitin, there is not a quick view of the match percentages for the entire class on one page, but since I need to open the student's submissions anyway to grade them, this is not a huge deal to me, but it does make it harder to quickly scan a class of submissions to check for any originality issues. The number of flagged passages is shown right here, so in many cases, you may not need to click open the full originality report if this is zero, since flagged passages do not include direct quotes. When you do click on the originality report, the information, like the student view, includes a count and percentage of flagged passages, quoted passages, and where the flagged passages matched online, with comparisons, and links directly to those pages on the web. Google Classroom's originality database currently includes items public on the web. Unlike Turnitin, which stores student submissions in its database for use in originality checking, student work that has been scanned or submitted in Classroom is not stored or retained by Google, so if a student turns in the same paper as a friend from the previous semester, that would not be flagged. But in the future, Google plans to add an option for schools to have a private repository of student submissions that the school owns, so instructors can see peer-to-peer matches. Google's originality report is a free tool that can hopefully deter plagiarism and help students identify ahead of time when they're doing too much copy-pasting and not enough synthesizing and summarizing. It is not a 100% safeguard against copied work, but there are so many ways for students to fool any originality checker if they are intentionally copying, that I think this is a great way to deter and educate without the huge price tag of most other plagiarism checkers.