Students and teachers are both part of the academic world. In the world of academics, integrity, and honesty are very important. Students are expected to be responsible and accountable for their work. They are expected to put in the time and effort to create unique assignments and write original essays as well as papers.

If their write-up is not original, i.e., it is plagiarized, they should be punished. It is the teacher’s responsibility to educate their students about plagiarism and enforce the punishments should their students not comply.

For students to avoid plagiarism and for teachers to find it, they both require a plagiarism checker. Now, all plagiarism checkers are not created equal. Some of them are better than others. In this article, we will list five such tools that both students and teachers can use.

1.      Editpad

Editpad’s plagiarism checker is a competent tool that can give its competitors a run for their money. Since this plagiarism checker for students is free, it means that students can easily check their assignments with the help of this plagiarism tool.

Editpad’s plagiarism checker does not perform like a standard plagiarism detector. What that means is that there is no database, instead, it compares the content against indexed sources online. If any source has similar content then that source is listed in the plagiarism report.

Speaking of the report, the part of the text that is plagiarized is underlined in red so users can spot it instantly. Other things included in the report are:

• The degree of plagiarism
• The degree of uniqueness
• List of plagiarized sources
• Total words
• Number of unique words

All in all a pretty comprehensive report. This brings us to the next topic which is its accuracy. From the image, we can see that the content is 100% plagiarized which is correct. That’s because we tested this tool using an article from Forbes. Since the entire article is already published, it should show up as 100% plagiarized.  Going forward the same article will be used to test all other tools on this list.

Another testament to this tool’s accuracy is the list of sources. It correctly identifies Forbes as the source of this article.

The paid version of this tool only allows users to check more words at once (around 3,000) while the free version lets you check 1,000 words. This is enough for students as they seldom have to write more than a thousand words in their assignments. Hence, overall, this is a suitable tool for students and teachers owing to its accuracy and accessibility.

2. Prepostseo

Prepostseo is a freemium online toolkit. It plagiarism checker is one of the best ones available on the internet. It provides a variety of useful features that are helpful to both students and teachers.

To check your content with this tool, you only need to copy-paste it into the text box. However, the free version of this tool can only check up to 1,000 words per check.

This is not a problem for most students as most assignments and essays do not span 1,000 words. Naturally, that extends to their teachers as well since they only have to check assignments that are shorter than 1,000 words.

For larger documents, they can either split the file into smaller chunks or they can upgrade to the premium version to increase the word limit.

We checked the content and got this result.

And we got the right result. The plagiarism checker did detect all of the content as plagiarized. It also correctly recognized the source as the Forbes article that we used.

So clearly, this tool works well. Great for teachers and students.

3.      Paper Rater

Paper Rater is a free plagiarism checker. It is an online tool and it allows people to check their content for plagiarism. It operates the same way as any other plagiarism checker and compares the inputted text with a bunch of online sources.

If a source has matching content as the input, then the tool includes that source in its report. Paper Rater is great for students and teachers because it is completely free. It is very easy to use and does not have any usage limits.

A student only needs to copy-paste or upload their file into the tool and click the “Get Report” button.

Once that is done, the tool generates a report in which it highlights the plagiarized parts and provides the sources as well. When we tested it, we got this result.

This report says that the content is 8% original, which is not quite correct. But an accuracy of 92% is still great. One weird thing about this report is that the same source is provided again and again for each individual matching sentence. But that is a minor issue and students and teachers only need to know that this tool can do the job pretty well.

4.      Study Moose

Study Moose is another free plagiarism checker that is very helpful for students and teachers. It performs the same way as other plagiarism checkers, and it even generates a report in the same way.

This tool does not require any account, so students can easily access it without any issues. The method to use it is the same as other tools i.e., input content and click the “Check my essay” button.

And then the tool will generate a report. The report looks like this.

This time the result says that the text is only 5% unique, meaning that it is 95% plagiarized. So, Study Moose is more accurate than Paper Rater but less accurate than Prepostseo. However, you should also consider that a 5% error is possible in all processes and can be safely ignored in most cases.

Anyhow, this is a great tool for students to check their work for accidental plagiarism. The red highlights are great for pinpointing the plagiarized areas which can be edited to avoid plagiarism. Teachers can use it for finding out if students are cheating or not.

5.      ITS

The free plagiarism checker by ITS can help students and teachers detect plagiarism in any given text. This plagiarism checker is a little bit different than the other tools on this list. Most of these changes are related to UI and the information given to the user at the end of the check. But more about that later.

This tool works in the same way as other online plagiarism checkers and compares the given content against billions of online sources. However, its results leave a lot to be desired. The following features are missing and they mar the experience a little bit.

• No exact figure of plagiarism or uniqueness
• Does not show the similarity index for each source
• Does not highlight in any way which part of the text is plagiarized

So, all you can find out from that is whether the given content has plagiarism or not. But that said, it does detect the right source and even quite a lot of obscure sources too. And it is free to use does not require an account and does not have usage limits which are all welcome features.

Conclusion

And those are the five best free plagiarism checkers for students and teachers to use. Students can utilize these free tools to find accidental plagiarism in their assignments and remove it before submission.

Teachers on the other hand can find out if students have cheated on their assignments or not. In this way, both parties can ensure that they are upholding academic integrity.