What is Unicheck? (Original Article is Found Here)
Unicheck is a plagiarism checker. It verifies the originality of submitted texts or documents and delivers detailed similarity reports to instructors and students.
Unicheck can be integrated into Canvas LMS and used by instructors in Canvas Assignment activity. After a student submits an assignment, the instructor receives a comprehensive similarity report, which becomes available within a few minutes.
Unicheck compares submitted documents with the Internet and the Unicheck Institutional Library (i.e., assignments submitted by other students and/or assignments that were directly uploaded to the Unicheck account by administrator or instructor).
Unicheck Report
Unicheck Report highlights all text segments that match Internet and Library sources and provides a list of matched sources. You can click on the highlighted segments to see the corresponding matched sources (alternatively, when you click on sources from the list, the corresponding text segments are highlighted).
Please refer to Unicheck Report Guide for more details on design and functionality of the Unicheck Report.
How to Enable Unicheck in the Canvas Assignment?
STEP 1: In assignment settings, select Online from Submission Type drop-down list, then tick File Uploads and/or Text Entry.
STEP 2: Select the Unicheck option from Plagiarism Review drop-down list.
If you do not see the Unicheck option in the drop-down list, please contact your LMS administrator. In this case, the administrator should verify whether the Unicheck app has been installed properly.
STEP 3: Modify Unicheck default settings if necessary.
Add submissions to Institutional Library. A copy of each submission within this assignment will be automatically saved to Unicheck Institutional Library. Only the final version of this assignment will be used by the system while checking future assignments.
Deactivate this setting if you do not want to store submissions in the Unicheck Institutional Library.
Exclude quotes & references. Unicheck will search and highlight properly formatted quotes (in-text citations) and references (APA, MLA, Chicago/Turabian, Harvard). Citations are marked in blue, while references are marked in purple.
Excluding quotes means highlighting them in the submitted document. Detected quotes will not be checked for plagiarism.
Excluding references means highlighting them in the submitted document. Detected references will not be checked for plagiarism.
Exclude sources. This option allows to automatically exclude matched sources based on the set parameters. For large texts like theses or dissertations, it is recommended to set the “%” value to “0” in order not to omit relevant matches. The minimum value for “Words” is “8”. Sources with combined matched word count less than the set value will be excluded.
Show originality report to students. Choose when you want your students to see their originality reports. The available options are Immediately, After the assignment is graded, After the due date, and Never.
STEP 4: Click Save at the bottom of the page to save assignment settings.
Does the Standard Canvas Functionality Change?
All Canvas assignment features and workflows are supported. Features like grading, group submissions, peer review, rubrics, annotations, etc., are all available in Canvas assignments with Unicheck enabled.
Note: Unicheck functionality will be available for courses created from Blueprint Courses only in cases when the Unicheck app is enabled on account or sub-account level (not within the blueprint course itself).
Can Students Submit Draft Assignments?
To offer your students an opportunity to submit a draft assignment and see the similarity report before making the final submission, you need to create a separate assignment and select the Immediately option for the Show originality report to students setting.
Note: For draft assignments, It is recommended to deactivate the Add submissions to Institutional Library setting.
How Do I Know When the Unicheck Report is Ready and How Can I View It?
Unicheck Report is generated within a few minutes after a student submits a document within a Canvas assignment. When you open the document in the SpeedGrader, you will see a colored similarity score indicator next to a file name, which means that the Unicheck Report is ready. Click on the similarity score indicator to view the online report.
Another option is to access Unicheck Report from the Grades section by clicking the colored indicator.
Unicheck Report uses different colors to display the similarity score indicator (each color is attributed to one particular similarity score range):
- Blue: 0%
- Green: 1-24%
- Yellow: 25-49%
- Orange: 50-74%
- Red: 75-100%
Can I Provide Feedback to Students?
Unicheck Report offers the Comments tool to provide feedback on any particular similarity report. When viewing a similarity report, click Comments, then highlight an area of the document (text and/or pictures) or click in any place in the document to leave a comment.
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Note: The Unicheck Comments tool is a separate tool that allows to leave comments specifically within the similarity report. You can still use the Canvas Assignment Comments tool to comment on an assignment. Your comments will be also added to the PDF Unicheck Report.
Download Unicheck Report and Original Submission
When viewing an online similarity report, go to the Options Menu.
- To download the Unicheck Report as a PDF file, click Export Report and then click Export to PDF.