Plagiarism query

[MelindaJollie]

A student's Similarity Score for plagiarism is 52.73%. It suggests two source options: www.thinkswap.com and www.coursehero.com. However, when I click on Compare, I get the following for both: 'The source you are trying to view has been updated and does not contain matches with your text.'

I notice that the actual link is www.thinkswap.com/plag-scan/au/hsc/english... and that is the only part of the URL I can read - the rest is obscured. I've attached an image of this. 

What does this mean, and what can I do?

Thanks!

[chriscas · Accepted solution]

Hi @MelindaJollie,

I think you may get a lot of varying opinions on this question, as it somewhat may depend on someone's own personal views and/or your school/institutions's views and policies around academic integrity.  In my mind, this would at least warrant a conversation with the student who submitted the paper.  See what they have to say about the results and go from there.  Maybe they will admit to copying some text...  Maybe they submitted the work elsewhere in the past...

On the technical side, I can speak form experience with Turnitin and Vericite (now Turniitin again).  The databases are made up partially of scnas of things publicly available on the web.  The fact that the system you're using indicates a match means that the text at some point was available on the public web.  As websites can add/move/delete things on a daily basis, yo may not always be able to find the resource in the plagiarism detection database in the future.  It definitely makes things harder to prove, but I think that's something we have to live with.  it's not really feasible for these services to rescan the entire web every day, modify their databases, adjust scores, etc.  It's more of that "moment in time" snapshot you have to content with.

I hope this helps a bit.

-Chris

[SusanNiemeyer]

Have you tried searching for the text on Google? That's another way of finding the original source material.