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Guide your students away from plagiarism

One way to prevent plagiarism is to discuss the topic with students. In this way, you contribute to their knowledge of how to reference correctly. It is always better to help students avoid plagiarism than to punish those who plagiarize. Many students need to gain an understanding of what plagiarism actually means in practice.

Inspera Originality has replaced Ouriginal

On October 31, 2025, Ouriginal was shut down and replaced by the new plagiarism checking tool: Inspera Originality. The change was due to the fact that the provider behind Ouriginal was acquired and chose to discontinue the service. Just like Ouriginal, Inspera Originality is used to analyze student submissions and generate reports to support your own assessment. 

Due to the transition, it’s important that you select Inspera Originality for assignments in Canvas. You as a teacher will need to manually select Inspera Originality in the settings for your current and future assignments.

If you import an assignment from a previous course that used Ouriginal as the plagiarism-detection tool, you may receive an error message during the import. The message indicates that the tool (Ouriginal) could not be found, and the issue is easily resolved by opening the imported assignment’s settings and selecting Inspera Originality instead.

Read more about the transition here: News about the transition from Ouriginal to Originality

Discuss with your students

Students do not always know what plagiarism is and that they are doing something wrong. Those who deliberately plagiarize have not always thought through the consequences for their own learning.

Tell your students what plagiarism is and what the consequences of it can be. Give examples and discuss together what can be problematic in the writing process.

Guiding students away from plagiarism

Presenter: Carl-Mikael Zetterling (professor at EECS, KTH), 2020-05-19. This webinar was held in English.

This webinar presents a six step strategy for deterring students from plagiarism. The strategy is described in the book “Guiding students away from plagiarism” (Carroll, Zetterling, 2009). You can find the whole book as a PDF via Diva and the link Guiding students away from plagiarism (kth.diva-portal.org) . The webinar discusses some ways to design assessment tasks that discourage copy-paste plagiarism and other cheating. There is also a recorded resource in KTH Play for students called "Avoiding plagiarism" which you may include in your courses, for example by linking to it on Canvas. To include the film, go to play.kth.se and search for the channel titled "Avoiding Plagiarism". 

Go to KTH Play for access to presentation material:
Guiding students away from plagiarism (KTH Play)

If you suspect plagiarism

If you discover a suspected plagiarism (text match) in an assignment, you need to assess of whether it may be misleading in examination. You must to do this regardless of whether the review was done via Canvas, with a seperate tool or manually. There is a designated contact person at each school to help you in plagiarism cases and similar disciplinary violations. 

List of contact persons and more information about disciplinary matters

Related: Promoting learning and preventing cheating

The video is in Swedish.

  • How can teachers, students and the university take measures to prevent cheating and at the same time promote learning?
  • What cultural, controlling and educational measures can be taken?
  • How do we relate to Generative AI in relation to examinations?

Among other things, Viggo Kann and Camilla Björn from the EECS school, and Ninni Carlsund and Magnus Andersson from the SCI school talk about this in this webinar. All of them are part of the PriU group for assessment and examination methods at KTH and have together written the report "To promote learning and prevent cheating" .