Soon, when you create an assignment in Google Classroom, you will have the choice to enable Originality Reports. Here's what happens when you do this:
- Students have their assignment scanned for originality. The scan checks for things like matches to content found in websites and books as well as against a database of other student work. Any potential matches that are found are flagged for the student to review and correct. Links to the matched information are provided.
- When the assignment is submitted to the teacher in Classroom, another originality report is generated for the teacher to see any potential matches of information.
Here are a couple of caveats:
1.) Teachers are only allowed to enable originality reports on 3 assignments per Classroom.
2.) Students can run up to 3 originality reports on an assignment, but only for assignments where the teacher has indeed enabled the originality reports feature.
This feature is intended to be a teaching tool for students, helping them to recognize and correct unintended plagiarism. It's not intended to be a "gotcha" tool for teachers. This makes sense, because ultimately, when we check for potential plagiarism in student work, it is so that the student can fix that problem and not make it again in future work, NOT to catch the student and punish him or her.
I will be compulsively checking Google Classroom for this feature to be active in our domain, and I will be sure to let you know when it's live for us. In the meantime, if you want to do some reading up on this feature, here are a couple of links for you to check out.
