Plagiarism review using Ouriginal
Ouriginal is a tool used for plagiarism review of assignments and should be used by teachers and examiners when students submit text files in Canvas. Ouriginal can also be used independently from Canvas. A good way to counter plagiarism is to raise the issue with your students and contribute to their knowledge of how to make references correctly.
Ouriginal reviews, the teacher decides
Ouriginal produces potential matching sources from three archives:
- Sources from the internet.
- Academically published material.
- Previously submitted student documents.
When Ouriginal searches for and records the degree of matching, it also consider all uses of rephrasing, synonyms and other forms of substitution. Ouriginal will therefore not be fooled by e.g. re-writing 'I bought milk' to 'lactose drink was purchased by me'.
You as a teacher must actively take a stand on the reports that Ouriginal provides.
Always read through the entire report
The report from Ouriginal is just a tool. A high or low match does not determine anything; it is the teacher who is responsible to review the report from Ouriginal and decide if it is plagiarism or not. In cases where the student has tried to deceive Ouriginal with documents that seem legitimate to humans but are unreadable to computers, Ouriginal will mark it as misspelt. Always read through the entire report and review what has been found. Also make sure you manually review the document and search for both differences in document layout and language as well as the document’s editing history. More information of what to manually look for can be found in the KTH Handbook:
Guiding students away from plagiarism (PDF)
(Please note that the English version of the Handbook starts on page 86).
Who can use Ouriginal and for what?
The purpose of Ouriginal is to support teachers’ assessment of student submissions in a course or in similar situations such as supervision of degree projects. For courses in Canvas you can use Ouriginal directly in the Canvas course room to check submissions for plagiarism.
You can use Ouriginal as a stand-alone tool if you do not have a Canvas room connected to your teaching role, for example if your role is to supervise degree projects, doctoral students or licentiates. Learn more about using Ouriginal outside of Canvas .
Doctoral students who teach may use Ouriginal to check their students' submissions for plagiarism, but in normal cases they shall not use it to review their own work. If a doctoral student wants to check for example their thesis regarding plagiarism this should be done in consultation with their supervisor. The plagiarism check is then carried out by the supervisor who sends the material to Ouriginal, or by the doctoral student who emails the material directly to the supervisor's analysis address. In both cases the supervisor receives the report from Ouriginal.
Which documents can/are eligible to be reviewed?
Only documents produced since KTH has had Ouriginal (2017 and onwards) may be reviewed. Note that the documents must be relevant to the course or education.
Ouriginal only process documents containing more than 430 characters and 20 words. If a too small document is submitted in Canvas, Ouriginal will e-mail the student to inform them that the document has not been forwarded to the recipient. Teachers, however, see the student's submission as usual in Canvas but with information that Ouriginal is still working on the assignment. Since Ouriginal will not review the submission, it will never be marked as finished in Canvas.
If a studentt submits a non-supported file format, an exclamation mark will be shown in Canvas for the submission.
Suspecting plagiarism?
If you discover possible plagiarism (text-matching) in an assignment you need to assess whether it may be an attempt of misleading during examination, regardless if it was reviwed by Ouriginal or manually. There is a designated contact person at each school to assist in plagiarism cases and similar disciplinary offenses.
List of contacts and more information about disciplinary matters
Guide your students away from plagiarism
It is always better to get students to avoid plagiarism than to punish those who plagiarize, especially since many students do not know what plagiarism is in practice.
Tell your students what plagiarism is and what the consequences may be. Feel free to share the page Cheating and plagiarism with your students so they can read about how they can avoid it.