Originality Reports in Google Classroom

The two most recent updates - Rubrics and Originality Reports - are now available to all users.

Originality Reports compare a student's work against millions of webpages and books, and produce a report showing the percent that may have been plagiarized or in need of citation.

For now, you can only turn on Originality Reports in Google Docs assignments, and you only get to use them on 3 assignments per classroom. After 45 days, an Originality Report expires and you can run a new one for another assignment.

Here's how to set up an Originality Report:

1. Create an Assignment and attach a Google Doc "Each Student Gets a Copy."   Check the "Originality Report" checkbox:

2. When students go to turn in work, they will have the option of running their own Originality Report to detect uncited passages before turning in their work:

3. When you are reviewing a student's work, in the right-side panel under their name you will see a link to run an Originality Report. Any flagged text will be identified here.

If this is a past assignment and you didn't previously set it up with an Originality Report, you can run it on the assignment from here.

4. Clicking the link will open up a full report that includes summaries of the amount plagiarized and the sources they match:

With the limited number of reports you can run, this is best used on a major assessment, like an end-of-unit essay.  It's also worth noting that if you're giving students a template using an assignment you found online, any instructions or questions you have pre-embedded into the doc may flag the plagiarism checker (I've had similar experiences in the past with TurnItIn.com). 

Still, this is a step in the right direction for Google Classroom moving more towards being a full service Learning Management System.