Tuesday, 16 November 2010
Paper Rater
As we are all about to submit our first paper that will be marked and we are thinking of what we will do for our other courses I thought I'd investigate this useful tool. I copied and pasted my DAC paper into it and waited for the few seconds it took to get a rating. It was with some trepidation that I clicked on the plagiarism indicator and found that it was 100% original. Well I wouldn't go that far, but at least I hadn't unwittingly picked up a chunk of text that wasn't attributed. It came up with a few grammar and spelling alternatives and one suggestion for a phrase that it thought I should change. I don't know what Diane thinks of this tool - but I think this could be really useful for students preparing for university entrance even if we don't want to use this for school age students. I'd be interested to see what some of my classmates think of this. Sorry it's not a pretty tool like many of the others I've seen.
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2 comments:
Thanks for drawing my attention to this one Irene.
We have a tool called TurnItIn which most universities use and technically we should run 10% of submissions through that each time. Eventually all our assignments will be submitted via that tool in fact though not sure if that will happen this year:-) So something like this could be a useful learning tool for writers getting into new writing tasks, especially for study purposes. I thought I'd do a check on a couple of pieces I have, one of which I know has plagiarism in it and the other with faulty grammar. The tool displays things to look at in different colours, which I thought could be a useful awareness raising function. Unfortunately it didn't give me a sense of confidence in identifying what I knew was there! For the plagiarised text, it did identify two online sources, but not everything there. Although the texts were located, the feedback indicated a 90% originality score with the advice 'check your referencing'. Of course these tools only check against online sources whereas TurnItIn matches against other databases of previous work. I then wondered if it could be a useful tool for proof reading as it claims, so I tried another text with grammar and spelling mistakes. Spellings were identified but not grammar. I was surprised given its claims so am willing to recognise I might have missed a trick somewhere. I suppose the problem is if tools like this only work partially, it could lull learners into a false sense of secruity:-) Then again if we know certain things will be found but not all, we can use this for what it does. Thanks again for raising this one! If anyone else has a go, let us know the results.
Hi Irene,
I like this tool. I just put my DAC essay in and apparantly I have not plagiarised, which is good to know! Although a few grammatical errors :-/
Thanks for sharing!
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