The 2018 Horizon report by Educause on edtech trends showed a major increase in technology use among educational institutions lately. It is explained by moving towards streamlining and democratizing student experience, equal access to education for students all around the globe, and thus improving the quality of the learning process.
Conventional school continues to grade students based on the outdated assessment standards without any focus on vital hard and soft skills. As a result, learners concentrate their attention solely on the formal side of obtaining credits and the degree. Multiply it by open accessibility of materials over the Internet and get the growing level of plagiarism in student works.
Learners can either steal sections of text and embed them into their papers or simply pay somebody to write their essay for them. 58% of students admitted to plagiarism during the last year. And 95% said they participated in various forms of cheating. A multi-million illegal essay mill business became another ugly side effect of this educational flaw.
In fact, there is a whole range of ways to deal with the problem of student cheating.
- First, they can instruct newcomers on academic integrity and why it is important to be authentic in their works. Also, what consequences using plagiarism could have.
- The other way is teaching students basic techniques of searching information, analyzing it, coming up with conclusions, offering ideas, so that they understand the mechanism of dealing with facts and interpreting them.
- And the third solution, which helps to adequately assess students and adds some additional motivation to being original in their writing is using plagiarism checking solutions.
It’s the reason why the majority of edtech tools at the peak of their fame are centered around shifting evaluation from quantity to quality metrics and identifying authorship of student papers. Anti-plagiarism solutions, like Unicheck, have already become the essential part of the learning process to help identify dishonesty among students. And here is how one tiny invisible plug-in stays ahead of the trend and solves the problem of plagiarism for numerous universities in the US:
- Learning Management Systems are considered the hottest trend in edutech. Unicheck acts as an essential application within such solutions. Every time, when a student paper is being uploaded for grading, it goes through the automatic plagiarism check right away. Found similarities will be displayed in the form of plagiarism percentage in front of every uploaded submission on the list. There is also a detailed interactive report available with all similarities highlighted and grouped by origin.
- One more thing/feature that contributes to a steady improvement in educational efficiency is collective similarity data of the university. It features originality and plagiarism rates, as well as the most popular plagiarism sources. This info will serve as a solid learning quality indicator in a multidimensional data pool.
- Cross-institution collaboration is another edutech trend implemented for a high precision of plagiarism detection. Agreeing to share libraries of student papers among universities and districts creates a growing basis for assuring student work authenticity.
- A Cherry on top! Contract cheating (or ghostwritten papers), which has been a huge pain for decades, will be easily detectable soon! An AI-powered authorship verification extension for Unicheck identifies the writing style and therefore can tell when the text is written by a different author.
Among educational institutions that implemented Unicheck last year, there was an average of 14% plagiarism in student works detected. During 2018 this level dropped down by 6%. And it keeps shrinking, while the number of universities launching the plagiarism solution increases by 20% annually.
And that’s a no-brainer, because we got to the point, where software does not only simplify operations for educators but, more importantly, contributes to the quality of education in the first place.