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December 27, 2012

PlagTracker – Weed Out Plagiarizers

Plagiarism is a major problem in high schools and universities across the country. From an educator’s perspective, however, catching every person who plagiarizes an essay or research report is a challenge, since it’s not always possible to know when a student has copied a portion of his or her assignment from another source. PlagTracker is a tool that educators can use to check their students’ work against a database of academic research reports without having to download any special tools or pay any exorbitant fees.

Start checking papers for plagiarism by heading to the PlagTracker website and pasting the text from a student’s report. If you require students to submit their assignments via email, then you can check for plagiarism even more quickly by uploading their files directly into the PlagTracker system. In mere seconds, PlagTracker will scan the work you’ve uploaded and check it against more than 20 million academic papers. The results of this scan will be published in a Plagiarism Report, which provides a percentage score based on the amount of non-unique content a student has submitted. The higher the score, the higher the probability that the student’s paper contains at least some instances of plagiarized work. PlagTracker’s reports even provide links to the sources of plagiarized work, which is useful when confronting students with allegations of cheating.

Although PlagTracker offers its basic tools for free, the web-application reserves its premium features for users with paid plans. PlagTracker runs plagiarism scans that are 3x faster for Premium Account holders. These users also get first priority in the queue (in times when there are backups) along with unlimited checking volume and file uploads.

Practical Uses:

  • Catch students who are cheating on their homework assignments
  • Find out when students are failing to cite sources in their research reports
  • Make sure you didn’t accidentally plagiarize any work before turning in your homework assignment

Insider Tips:

  • Assignments can be copy/pasted into PlagTracker or uploaded directly
  • Premium users can upload files in .doc or .txt format
  • Upgrade to a paid account to get access to grammar check tools
  • PlagTracker does not save copies of the content its users upload

What we liked:

  • Most assignments can be checked for plagiarism in a matter of seconds
  • PlagTracker provides a score based on the amount of non-unique content that appears in a paper
  • PlagTracker highlights any instances of plagiarism right on the uploaded text
  • PlagTracker provides links to the sources that were copied in an assignment

What we didn’t like:

  • Users with free accounts can only upload documents with a maximum of 5,000 characters

Alternatives:

Company Info:

Costs:

  • Free plan
  • Premium Account is $14.99 (or $7.49 with coupon code)

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