The Unicheck Plugin for Moodle LMS
Integration with Moodle Activities
The Assignment Activity
How to Enable and Configure Unicheck in the Moodle Assignment
How do I Know if the Unicheck Report for the Checked Student Submission is Available?
Interpreting the Unicheck Report
How do I provide feedback to a student based on Unicheck report results?
Grading the Assignment
How do I Download the Unicheck Report in .pdf?
Do I Need to Sign Up for the Individual Unicheck Account to Use the Unicheck App?
How to Scan Previous Submissions for Plagiarism Using Unicheck Plugin
What File Types Are Supported?
The Forum Activity
The Workshop Activity
I Want to Suggest a Feature, Provide Feedback

The Unicheck Plugin for Moodle LMS

Designed based on educators’ feedback, Unicheck is a plagiarism detection engine helping educators spot plagiarism and assist in teaching students to write originally.

To start using the app, please register at unicheck.com or get in touch with the sales team via sales@unicheck.com. It takes a few minutes to set up your account and get the ball rolling. This plugin integrates with assignment, forum and workshop activities in Moodle to check user-submitted content for plagiarism.

For more information about the Unicheck plugin, please visit the Moodle plugin database page at https://moodle.org/plugins/plagiarism_unicheck.

Integration with Moodle Activities

The Unicheck plugin works with the following Moodle activities:

Unicheck automatically produces a plagiarism report for each student submission.

The Assignment Activity

How to Enable and Configure Unicheck in the Moodle Assignment

Unicheck plugin supports both online text and file submission. Create Moodle assignment and navigate to Unicheck plagiarism plugin section to adjust the settings.

Note: to use Unicheck plugin, first set option Require students click submit button to Yes (Submissions settings).

Enable Unicheck Plagiarism Service	New submissions will be automatically checked for similarities right after submissions.
Check already delivered assignment submissions	In case Unicheck was disabled or if you want to generate reports for past submissions, enable this option and save assignment settings. This will trigger bulk check of all work (files and/or text) submitted for grading. Check will start after few minutes after enabling the option.
Add submissions to Institutional Library	Student submissions are added to private Institutional Library only when this option is enabled. New student submissions are compared with works stored in this Institutional Library, in addition to Internet. This library consists only from papers submitted by students of this institution and is not shared with other institutions.
Sources for comparison	Internet - live Internet collection of billions of online resources (articles, web pages, blog posts, news, files etc.). This source includes open access publications in repositories, journals and publications on authors' personal sites. Unicheck Institutional Library - collection of student submissions maintained by this institution. Files are added to collection only when option "Add to Unicheck Institutional Library" is enabled. External database - additional text data sources maintained by this institution (i.e. historical student submissions).
Exclude sources with a match less than (%)	Sources which have less than specified similarity % will not be included in the total similarity score.
Exclude sources with a match less than (words)	Sources which have less than specified number of words (8 minimum) will not be included in the total similarity score.
Exclude references and citations	Enable this option to identify and exclude references and citations. Unicheck identifies citations according to rules described in APA, MLA, Chicago, Turabian, Harvard guides. Citations will be marked with blue color and references will be marked with violet color. Such items will be excluded from total similarity score.
Show similarity scores to student	Students only see similarity scores for their own submissions and do not see scores of other students.
Show similarity reports to student	Students only see similarity reports for their own submissions and do not see reports of other students.
Notify students via email	Students will receive information about the results of the check via e-mail.
Maximum number of files to be checked in archive	Specify maximum number of files to be reviewed by Unicheck. System will pick only file types supported by Unicheck and will process files one by one. Supported formats: ZIP, RAR.

Remember to save the assignment settings.

Once the assignment is published and becomes available, students can submit files. The Unicheck report will be generated automatically. If a similarity score and report are visible to students, clicking on the chain icon will open the Unicheck report.

How do I Know if the Unicheck Report for the Checked Student Submission is Available?

The assignment page has the Submitted counter, which shows number of submissions which require attention.

Click View/grade all submissions to view the submission results.

Students who have submitted papers will have the Submitted for grading status. When the Unicheck report has been generated for the student submission, you will see the Unicheck icon next to the file, as well as a similarity rate and link to the report. Click on the chain icon to open the Unicheck report.

Interpreting the Unicheck Report

The text highlighted with yellow matches one or more sources.
The text highlighted with dark yellow matches the selected source.
(to have the text area highlighted, click on a particular source in the List of similarity resources section)
Possible character replacement highlighted in red and underlined.

Citations are highlighted with blue color and can be excluded from the originality report (an originality/similarity score is changed accordingly). Enable this option on the Exclude tab. Unicheck recognizes most commonly used styles, including APA, MLA, Chicago and Turabian.

Note: user can enable/disable every citation individually.

References are highlighted with purple and can be excluded from the originality report (an originality/similarity score is adjusted accordingly). Enable this option on the Exclude tab.

How do I provide feedback to a student based on Unicheck report results?

Teachers can annotate directly on the students’ submissions, using a native Moodle LMS annotation tool (works with PDF, docx or odt files and text submissions when Comment inline option is enabled). A link to Unicheck report will be displayed next to the submitted file(s). Learn more.

Option#2

Alternatively, teachers can use a built-in Commenting mode feature of Unicheck report:

Select an area in the student text, and type in a comment, click Post to save the comment:

Create new comments, edit or delete existing ones. When finished, click Publish comments to let a student see the comments (until published, comments are also not included in the Unicheck PDF report):

Student will see a notification when new comments are posted:

Selecting specific comment will automatically scroll the report to the relevant place in the document.

Option#3

If you'd like to download student original submission, and annotate it using a local tool like MS Word, you can upload the file with comments as part of the teacher's feedback. This is a standard feature of Moodle, so you won't be uploading the feedback to Unicheck directly.

To enable Feedback files, select the checkbox in the assignment settings:

Grading the Assignment

Grade the assignment using the standard Moodle grading tools.

How do I Download the Unicheck Report in .pdf?

Open the Unicheck report and click Generate Report button. Once a report is ready, the button name will change to Download Report and the color of the button will change to blue. Click on the button to download a PDF report.

Do I Need to Sign Up for the Individual Unicheck Account to Use the Unicheck App?

No, instructors don’t need to have individual Unicheck accounts (although they may have them). Once the administrator of the LMS installs the Unicheck plugin for the organization, it is available for all instructors and students.

How to Scan Previous Submissions for Plagiarism Using Unicheck Plugin

You might want to scan submissions that have occurred prior to installation, enablement or use of Unicheck plugin. To do this, enable Unicheck plugin for specific assignment and choose whether you want to scan all submissions in the assignment at once or select specific submissions and launch a scan manually.

When you set Check already submitted assignments = Yes, all submissions will be scanned automatically (scans do not start immediately, it may take a minute or so). When option is set to No, instructor has a choice of which submissions to scan manually.

Manual scan

Open the assignment/Grading summary and click View/grade all submissions. For submissions that were not previously scanned by Unicheck, Start a scan button will be shown. Click the button and the file will be sent to Unicheck for similarity check. Once a report is ready, similarity rate and the report will be displayed next to the submission as usual (repeat for every file you need to scan).

What File Types Are Supported?

If students are allowed to upload multiple files to the assignment, they can attach several files, including a zip / rar archive in a single assignment:

Microsoft Office: DOCX, DOX, PPT, PPTX, XLS, XLSX;
Text files: TXT, RTF;
PDF files;
PAGES (Apple document format);
Other formats: ODT, HTML, XML.

For more info, refer to a complete file list.

For a zip / rar archive, we will show a report with 2 tabs: first tab lists all of the files in a zip / rar archive and status of the report. Report ready means that Unicheck report has been successfully generated for a file. Otherwise - we will indicate an error or an explanation why the file was skipped in our check.

Click on a file name to view the report.

The Forum Activity

Open the forum settings and navigate to the Unicheck plagiarism plugin section.

Enable Unicheck Plagiarism Service	New submissions will be automatically checked for similarities right after submissions.
Sources for comparison	Internet - live Internet collection of billions of online resources (articles, web pages, blog posts, news, files etc.). This source includes open access publications in repositories, journals and publications on authors' personal sites. Unicheck Institutional Library - collection of student submissions maintained by this institution. Files are added to collection only when option "Add to Unicheck Institutional Library" is enabled. External database - additional text data sources maintained by this institution (i.e. historical student submissions).
Exclude sources with a match less than (%)	Sources which have less than specified similarity % will not be included in the total similarity score.
Exclude sources with a match less than (words)	Sources which have less than specified number of words (8 minimum) will not be included in the total similarity score.
Exclude references and citations	Enable this option to identify and exclude references and citations. Unicheck identifies citations according to rules described in APA, MLA, Chicago, Turabian, Harvard guides. Citations will be marked with blue color and references will be marked with violet color. Such items will be excluded from total similarity score.
Show similarity scores to student	Students only see similarity scores for their own submissions and do not see scores of other students.
Show similarity reports to student	Students only see similarity reports for their own submissions and do not see reports of other students.
Notify students via email	Students will receive information about the results of the check via e-mail.
Maximum number of files to be checked in archive	Specify maximum number of files to be reviewed by Unicheck. System will pick only file types supported by Unicheck and will process files one by one. Supported formats: ZIP, RAR.

Remember to save the settings.

When students post replies on the forum, the Unicheck report will be automatically generated for the posted text and files. Click the chain icon to view a detailed Unicheck report.

Manual scan is not supported. Unicheck automatically produces a report for all replies or files (partial scan is not supported, i.e. you cannot verify a specific reply and omit the others). Turning off/on Unicheck will drop previous similarity results and once re-enabled, reports will be generated only for new replies (starting from the moment when plugin was enabled again).

Note: usually, students have the ability to edit posts in Forum activity. For every post edit, Unicheck will generate a new report. If a score and a report are visible to a student, and similarity % is high, a user may be tempted to edit the post to decrease total similarity %. Be careful when opening visibility of Unicheck report and score to students. To prevent abuse, you may want to hide Unicheck results from students (or at least hide results before the activity is closed).

The Workshop Activity

Unicheck report can be generated for online text or online text + file submission. Note, student submissions will be scanned for plagiarism only after the assignment is switched to Assessment phase (in this phase students can no longer amend the submissions). The submission is not scanned again, if you switch the steps back and forth.

Manual scan is not supported, Unicheck automatically produces a report for all files.

Make sure to enable visibility of similarity results to students if you want them to see Unicheck results when they assess each other.

A student can see/access Unicheck report for his/her peer if allowed by teacher:

I Want to Suggest a Feature, Provide Feedback

Feel free to contact Unicheck account manager and suggest improvements or provide feedback. We’ll do our best to improve the product/service based on your suggestions.

Instructor's Guide