ReviewMe Review: iPlagiarismCheck
October 2nd, 2007, 5 Comments »
This is a review for ReviewMe, first discussed around here last year. The subject of the review pays me to review their product or service, though I’m under no obligation to provide a positive review. Let me know if you think this sort of thing is arse–I’m definitely seeking feedback.
One other note: I’m using the rel=”nofollow” tag for ReviewMe subjects, so that they’re not buying my link juice along with their review.
Of the five or so ReviewMe products and services I’ve reviewed, iPlagiarismCheck is the one that’s intrigued me the most. I really don’t know anything about plagiarism checking services, but I’d like to.
I asked a relative who’s a university professor, and she told me that they do, in fact, use such a service at her school. However, she also told me that googling suspicious phrases works pretty effectively.
Here’s their spiel:
Plagiarism-Checkers is a privately-held company specializing in collaborative e-learning and assessment solutions for academic, publishing and corporate clients. Various online applications produced by Plagiarism-Checkers are in use by hundreds of institutions and companies worldwide, serving an overall user population of over 2 million.
Blatant SEO Tricks
UPDATE: The keyword stuffing I referred to is gone from the website, but it was definitely there last night. Peculiar.
A brief comment on their website. At first glance I liked it well enough–charming line-drawing and so forth. It’s a bit text-heavy, but that’s a common enough mistake. Scroll down to the bottom of the page, however, and see why they lost all credibility with me. They’re keyword stuffing using a bunch of unformatted paragraphs of descriptive text. That feels pretty spammy to me, and isn’t really legitimate tactic. Such blatant SEO tricks (which probably don’t work) don’t reflect well on the company.
Tacky website aside, does the service work? I cut and pasted together a short essay on the Rose Theatre, an Elizabethan theatre in which Shakspeare acted. I built the essay from various sources. I also submitted a very short, completely original essay as a control. You can see my longer, cobbled-together essay after the jump, with added labels indicating the origin of each paragraph.
They correctly didn’t find anything wrong with my completely original essay. Here’s what I got back from iPlagiarismCheck on the heavily-copied one (click for larger version):
Two for Five Ain’t Good Enough
They only spotted the Wikipedia content. They did also find a sentence in the last paragraph, but didn’t assign it to the right source. I presume a student from Panther Valley High (do you suppose their football team is named ‘The Panthers’?) copied it from the same book that I did.
If I’m a university professor, that’s unsatisfactory. The service claims that they “check your documents against hard and soft copy publications of all kinds”, but they missed both books I copied out of, as well as the stuff from this website. In the time it took me to submit the essay, I could have googled sentences from each paragraph and had a better success rate.
There’s no nice way to put this: based on my anecdotal test, iPlagiarismCheck doesn’t work well enough.