Happy National STEM/STEAM Day Eve!

The internet makes plagiarism so easy! This week’s tip was spurred by Mrs. McAlpin from the middle school who had a student show her an awesome website called EssayTyper that will create an essay on any topic you choose. I played around with the site for a while. Turns out all it does is search for whatever topic you type in on Wikipedia and copies different sections. It also makes it look like the user is typing in a word processor if anybody is looking over their shoulder. There are other sites like this, some more complex, but all of them have a weakness, the internet makes finding plagiarism so easy!

Quetext is an online plagiarism checker, copy and paste anything into it and it’ll scan the web looking for those phrases, paste in a few sentences or an entire paper. After its search it gives the piece a score (higher is worse/more plagiarized) and highlights phrases it found on the web and shows you where they are. There are other sites like this out there, this one is simple and easy to use, making it my favorite. Funny thing is, when I was going to run an EssayTyper essay through Quetext I couldn’t copy and paste the text. Turns out, you can’t copy/paste from EssayTyper, or at least I couldn’t figure out a way to do it, so I doubt students are using it to cheat.

Quetext is also good to show to your kids to help them create citations. After writing an essay they can run it through themselves to make sure they have correctly quoted all sources they used BEFORE getting in trouble.