Plagiarism Detection

See Conditions of Use at the top of this page.

The University’s plagiarism detection tool is an electronic resource that assists in the detection and deterrence of plagiarism. Instructors using this tool can create an Assignment in their Quercus course to which students submit their assignments electronically. Each submitted paper is checked for textual similarity using millions of resources stored in the company’s database. Once analyzed, Similarity Reports (formerly referred to as Originality Reports) are generated within 5-10 minutes for instructors, highlighting questionable areas. Instructors can access and view the Similarity Report in their Quercus course. Using this information as well as any other relevant information, it is then up to the individual instructor to determine if these passages represent plagiarism.

All work submitted to the University’s plagiarism detection tool is checked against three databases of content:

• A current and archived copy of the publicly accessible Internet (more than 4.5 billion pages updated at a rate of 30-40 million pages per day);
• Millions of published works (from ABI/Inform, Periodical Abstracts, Business Dateline, ProQuest, the Gutenberg Collection of literary classics, and tens of thousands of electronic books);
• Millions of student papers submitted to University’s plagiarism detection tool since 1996.

The University’s plagiarism detection tool is available for use in Quercus courses. Instructors using this tool can create Assignments in their Quercus course to which students submit their assignments electronically. With the integration of the University’s plagiarism detection tool into Quercus class and assignment setup on the company’s website are no longer supported.

• For information on using University’s plagiarism detection tool in your Quercus course, please visit Plagiarism Review Tool Guide 
• For details on how to create the University’s plagiarism detection tool in an  assignment, please see the Set Up an Assignment section of the Plagiarism Review Tool Guide 

Students can submit to an assignment by taking the following steps:

• Student Instructions [uoft.me/pdt-student]

Students must be notified at the start of a course. The course syllabus must include the following statement:

“Normally, students will be required to submit their course essays to the University’s plagiarism detection tool for a review of textual similarity and detection of possible plagiarism. In doing so, students will allow their essays to be included as source documents in the tool’s reference database, where they will be used solely for the purpose of detecting plagiarism. The terms that apply to the University’s use of this tool are described on the Centre for Teaching Support & Innovation web site (https://uoft.me/pdt-faq).”

In addition, it is recommended that you also take a few moments in class at the outset of your course to discuss the use of the University’s plagiarism detection tool and the issue of academic integrity with your students. You may wish to consult U of T’s resources (for faculty, students and TAs) on academic integrity available online at: http://academicintegrity.utoronto.ca/

As part of the licensing agreement with the University’s plagiarism detection tool instructors are required to inform students at the start of a course that this program will be used to check their papers. Further, students should be informed of its use, since their papers are retained in the company’s database. Note however, that students retain the copyright on their work.

Students submit their own papers via online submission using the Quercus Assignment tool.

Student submissions to the University’s plagiarism detection tool Assignments can viewed and graded using the Speedgrader tool in Quercus.

For each paper submitted, a Similarity Report is generated by the University’s plagiarism detection tool. The Similarity Report highlights textual similarities found within a submitted paper and provides links to sources that contain similar text.

Those wishing to use the University’s plagiarism detection tool must adhere to the Conditions of Use for the University of Toronto. Similarity Reports highlight passages that may be of concern, but do not automatically report whether a paper has been plagiarized. Determining if plagiarism has occurred requires analysis by the instructor. This Similarity Report can be viewed side-by-side with the original paper to facilitate comparison.

For information on what constitutes plagiarism at U of T consult the Code of Behaviour on Academic Matters and/or your department or division.

View the Similarity Report  

Understanding Similarity Reports (PDF)

Submitted papers are stored in the the company’s database but are not the property of the University’s plagiarism detection tool. Instructors can only access those papers that were directly submitted to their own course. Similarly, students can only access and view the papers that they have submitted in their Quercus courses.

The conditions of use for the University’s plagiarism detection tool apply to both undergraduate and graduate course papers.

Supervisors should ensure that they have the explicit consent of a student before they submit their thesis to University’s plagiarism detection tool.

Under Canadian copyright laws students retain the copyright to any papers submitted to the University’s plagiarism detection tool.  The University’s plagiarism detection tool creates digital fingerprints of student papers – which are not “true derivative works for copyright purposes; they contain only uncopyrightable numerical algorithms regarding the papers but not the papers themselves.” (See their Privacy and Copyright document for more information.)

The intellectual property of all students submitting to University’s plagiarism detection tool is protected by the licensing agreement between the University of Toronto and iParadigms. In addition, this agreement ensures that student papers submitted to University’s plagiarism detection tool will not be used for commercial purposes.

Privacy and Security information 

There are a number of alternate methods that can be implemented, including:

• requiring annotated bibliographies from students;
• requiring students submit all rough work with their papers;
• requiring that students include the call numbers or web site addresses of all sources cited in their paper.

The University’s plagiarism detection tool now handles text correctly in 31 languages in addition to English:

Arabic, Catalan, Chinese (simplified and traditional), Croatian, Czech, Danish, Dutch, Finnish, French, German, Greek, Hebrew, Hungarian, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Norwegian (Bokmal, Nynorsk), Farsi, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Russian, Serbian, Slovak, Slovenian, Spanish, Swedish, Thai, Turkish

This also means the University’s plagiarism detection tool is indexing many additional websites that contain those languages against which we compare submitted papers.

At U of T, our conditions of use require that students be informed at the outset of the course that the instructor intends to use the University’s plagiarism detection tool. Our practice is to ask students to submit directly to the University’s plagiarism detection tool assignment, rather than having instructors submit on behalf of the students. This ensures that students can opt out of using the program – something that we allow for here without penalty.

And so this means, that instructors cannot submit a paper through University’s plagiarism detection tool without the student’s knowledge. You can ask your student to submit directly to the University’s plagiarism detection tool but you cannot require them to do so.

There are a number of methods that can be implemented as an alternative to using the University’s plagiarism detection tool to check for plagiarism including:

• requiring annotated bibliographies from students;
• Requiring students submit all rough work with their papers;
• Requiring that students include the call numbers or web site addresses of all sources cited in their paper.