Google announced the launch of Assignments for higher education instructors using its G Suite for Education. It helps instructors create, assign and grade coursework through Google Drive. For the instructors, it’s basically a tool to catch plagiarism, in addition to helping making the grading process a lot easier.
One of the key components of Assignments is called “Originality Reports”. This is basically the plagiarism checker that is used to check for improper paraphrasing or missing citations. This allows educators to check a submission against “hundreds of billions of web pages” and “tens of millions of books”. This saves them from having to copy and paste lines into Google Search to check for them manually.
Fortunately for honest students, they will also have access to this tool. That said, students can only run the check three times. The idea is to allow them a chance to catch mistakes that they have missed, without allowing them to redo their work over and over to avoid detection. There are other tools as well as part of Google Assignments, including spellchecks and grammar suggestions.
Google Assignments and its Originality Reports are currently in beta, and will go live later in fall. They are also a free addition to G Suite for Education.
(Source: Google [1], [2] via TechCrunch, Engadget)
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