plagiarism check

Plagiarism is not an issue if you reference properly and express ideas from sources in your own words and refrain from copying and pasting passages and sentences into your work.

Turnitin is a clever piece of software that matches text against published articles, books and websites as well as work that has been submitted to universities and other educational establishments,. So anything that has been copied and pasted into your work will be highlighted and shown in the Turnitin text matching report It will identify the original source or stiudent(s) piece of work that it has matched passages to (including the date they submitted and be traceable to their name and ACCA registration number)

Some students think they can get around matching by changing the odd word here and there or substitute a synonym. In fact this rarely works because the matching report highlights the copied text in a colour but will show the changed words in black text – so in fact it is even more obvious to anyone who is trained on interpreting the program matching report what has gone on.

Also using a dictionary or thesaurus to find substitute words can sometimes result in ‘silly English’ especially if the student’s first language is not English because the same word both has nuances of meaning or grammatically may have different meanings depending on the different parts of speech. For example I read a student’s report where they kept talking about profit or sales ‘augmenting’. Sure, augment does mean increase but has anyone seen this in relation to a company report or accounting text book ? Of course the obvious word in this context is ‘increasing’ but the piece they had copied from had used this, so instead they used a thesaurus to try to come up with a different word! The word ‘back can have different meanings depending upon whether it is a verb, preposition or noun so the synonym will depend on which it is in the sentence – so students who don’t understand grammar can make some sentences read like total nonsense.

The funniest example I ever found was student who had written in their SLS about ‘Oxford Rivulets University’ – work that one out for yourself (as markers we all fall about and awarded it the most obvious bit of copying and word substitution that we were ever likely to find).

Just because you may use the same topic and organisaton does not really increase the danger of plagiarism as if it is original work, then any matches will still be fairly low. For example I have probably had more than a dozen students who have based their Topic 17 on the same organisation and yet every single report was fairly different. Apart from the citations of the UK CG Code (one of the few sources you are permitted to copy because it is impossible and in fact not really desirable to rephrase such a precise document like a code or legislation) there were probably very few matches.

Please consult the plagiarism advice on OBU’s own ACCA OBU mentoring website as it may suggest suitable and reliable software to use.

This is important because there are two dangesr of using any program you may find online. Firstly how reliable is it ? Will it really do the job and identify any matched text accurately? If not then you may get a false sense of security. The second and bigger danger is that a digital copy of your work may be retained on its database. Unless the company producing the software has integrity and operates to high standards this may lay your work open to being copied or sold on.

(A disreputable industry has built up whereby organisations offer to ‘help’ students write their academic work. In reality this ‘help’ is based on writing most of the work and selling it to students to submit as their own. So some organizations will offer free plagiarism software to obtain examples of reports to edit and sell to other students).

I have no idea as to the merits or otherwise of ‘Grammerly’ so I cannot really pass judgment except to wonder if either they have deliberately chosen a name that is ‘memorable’ or ironic. Perhaps you have misspelled the name but I would have expected it to be spelt with an ‘a’ and not an ‘ e’ since grammar is spelt accordingly and I am unaware of grammarly (even spelt with an a ) as being a word that you would find in the English dictionary and ask myself therefore is the word grammarly / grammerly GRAMMATICALLY correct?

Turnitin itself of course does pass the ‘sniff test’ i.e. it is 100% reliable and reputable. If used by students however it is absolutely VITAL that you retain the Turnitin matching report and it clearly shows YOUR name. This is because. OBU will put your work through Turnitin and, doing what it is designed to do, i.e. match text, it will match it up to your ‘test’ attempt. The questions then OBU will ask is why,, when and who put it through Turnitin before and unless you can provide proper evidence that it is your original work (an example being the original Turnitin report you received when you put your work through it) it would appear to be a copy from a writing service and possibly failed.

It is clearly stated in the Information Pack that you must retain any copies of Turnitin relating to your work and on submitting you agree that you have read the OBU T&Cs. Therefore failure to be able to produce the document may be construed as suspicious