After receiving my originality report, I noticed only two things were highlighted in my paper. The two things that were highlighted were my source’s title name. It was first highlighted when I introduced it in the first paragraph, and it highlighted the source title a second time in my works cited list. I believe these highlights were a glitch in the plagiarism checker because the essay prompt required me to introduce the source title and its author.
The plagiarism checker did miss couple things within my essay, however. There were areas in my essay where I paraphrased the author’s idea but failed to provide in-text citations. This is considered plagiarism, and I believe the originality report didn’t identify this because I rephrased the author’s ideas in my own words. Another area the originality report failed to report plagiarism was when I used more than three words from my source and failed to put it in quotation marks. I believe this error occurred because the three words that I failed to put in quotation marks were very common words that could have appeared anywhere.
After analyzing the plagiarism checker, I believe this is a tool teachers have to work with carefully in order to identify plagiarized materials. While the plagiarism checker is more than capable of identifying large length of texts that are directly stolen from a source, it will fail to identify areas within the paper where the student uses 3 to 4 unique words from the source and fail to put it in quotation marks. A teacher’s judgement comes in play here because the teacher would need to figure out from what part of the source these words come from. These mistakes could also be an honest mistake from the student’s side as well. There are times when students fail to provide in-text citations after paraphrasing or quoting a material. Thus, I believe the teacher needs to use his or her own investigative abilities alongside with the plagiarism checker in order to figure out whether if the student is actually attempting to commit plagiarism.