Plagiarism Software in Canvas

[timboscifi]

Is Unicheck a free plagiarism checker?  And if so, how much does it cost to change to Turnitin or some other checker?

[rmurchshafer]

Timothy,

Neither are free.  If Unicheck is enabled right now in your instance of Canvas it likely means your school has licensed it.  They would need to license TurnItIn for it to show up as well or instead of Unicheck.  

Rick

[timboscifi]

Right. I thought that was the case. We are having no luck with Unicheck finding papers on sites like Course Hero or frankly any site. I am wondering if others are having better luck with Turnitin, though I am sure it costs more. Is this a classic case of getting what you pay for?

If they give you ruled paper, write the other way. —Ray Bradbury

[Alisia_Brin]

Hi @ Timothy McGinn, 

Thank you for your questions. Let me explain the case. Rick is right: Unicheck is not a free tool. However, you can be granted a free account by your administrator if your school or university is licensed to use it. 

The website mentioned by you, CourseHero (and all the similar ones), can be indexed neither by Unicheck nor by any other plagiarism detection software. It’s not a question of pricing. It is prohibited by the terms of use of such websites https://www.coursehero.com/terms-of-use/. CourseHero and similar websites disallow any crawling of their materials. Thus, no plagiarism checker can be granted access to their databases. 

In case you still have any questions, please feel free to get in touch with our Support Team at support@unicheck.com at any time.