Putting an end to plagiarism

The University of Copenhagen is launching a surprise attack on plagiarism. Last autumn, to little fanfare, the university unveiled its new text-comparison system Urkund, which is better than its predecessor at detecting copied material.

Starting with the winter 2017-18 exams, all theses will now be reviewed using Urkund.

“The past two years the number of on-line exams has increased. Instead of taking hand-written exams, students can now submit them on-line. The intention has always been to implement mandatory plagiarism checks as part of this process,” says Asbjørn Jessen, the head of UCPH’s Data & Systems, and a section head with University Educational Services.

Urkund is a user-friendly system and the reports it produces are more useful than the ones from the other systems we looked at

Asbjørn Jessen

User-friendly

Until now, formal plagiarism checks have not been mandatory for master’s theses, unlike other types of exams. This has been due to the fact that the university’s on-line examination system was unable to do so, Jessen says.

Urkund changes that.

According to Jessen, Urkund was chosen because its use is widespread among the external examiners and faculty at the Danish universities KU works with.

“Like them, we think Urkund is a user-friendly system and that the reports it produces are more useful than the ones from the other systems we looked at,” Jessen says.

More hits, but only on the surface

Compared with the current system, Ukrund will be able to find more instances of plagiarism, just as it can be used to search for specific things. Its reviews, however, will still only be cursory.

“More thorough comparisons would have required a more advanced system and that would have made it more complicated to use. That was something we wanted to avoid,” Jessen says.

One example of what such systems can do is the university’s system for reviewing doctoral dissertations. Reviewers can use the system to compare it with all academic texts that might be relevant to a given dissertation. Doing so, however, it complicated.

The main motivation for seeking a replacement for Ephourus, the previous comparison system, was that its developer had been bought out. As a result, the university was unable to reach an agreement with that provided satisfactory service guarantees for Urkund, and for the latest version of Absalon, the school’s computer system.

What they get

The screendumps below show the reports Urkund draws up for examiners and external examiners.