Instructor's Guide

What is Unicheck?

Unicheck Report

How to Enable Unicheck in the Canvas Assignment?

Does the Standard Canvas Functionality Change?

Can Students Submit Draft Assignments?

How Do I Know When the Unicheck Report is Ready and How Can I View It?

Can I Provide Feedback to Students?

Download Unicheck Report and Original Submission

How to Check Documents Directly in the Unicheck Account?

Course Extension

What is Unicheck?

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, 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, assignment enhancements for students, 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.

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.

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.

To download the originally submitted document, click Download Original File.

How to Check Documents Directly in the Unicheck Account?

Besides using the Canvas environment, you can upload documents directly to your web-based Unicheck account. To use this account you need to be granted access by your LMS administrator.

To upload a document directly to the Unicheck account, follow the steps listed below:

STEP 1: Go to https://unicheck.com/login/education and log in using the details provided by your LMS administrator.

STEP 2: Go to the Library section and click Add +. You can upload files from your computer, Google Drive, Dropbox, or OneDrive.

STEP 3: Tick the file(s) you want to check and click Check for Similarity, then click Start Check.

When generating a Unicheck Report, you can choose one of the three ways to check your document:

(1) Doc vs Internet

(2) Doc vs Library

(3) Doc vs Internet + Library

STEP 4: Once the Unicheck Report is ready, you will find it under the submitted document's name. Click on the file name to view the report.

Please refer to Instructor Account article for more details on how to manage your Unicheck account.

Course Extension

Unicheck’s Canvas Course Extension allows instructors and students to use additional functionality offered by Unicheck directly in their Canvas environments. If you see the "Unicheck" section on the side panel in Canvas, it means that the extension has been enabled by your LMS administrator and you can start using it.

Submissions

This is your Unicheck library. You can use this section to upload files and check them for similarity. This section only contains files added by yourself — no student submissions are displayed here.

Upload / create files and folders
Upload files to be checked for similarity, create new folders or text files.

Check documents for similarity
Tick the box next to the document you want to check and then click Check for Similarity. The document will be checked against Internet and Library sources.

Student Self-Checks

To switch between Submissions and Student Self-Checks, click on the Options icon at the top left of your screen. In the Student Self-Checks section, you can see your assignments and review how students use self-checks.

To view assignments, click the Assignments tab.

You can change the number of self-check attempts available to students in any particular assignment. To do this, select the number from the drop-down menu in the Attempts Per Student column.

To change the default number of self-check attempts for all assignments, go to Settings at the top left corner of your screen.

Click on the assignment folder to view the students who used self-checks within the assignment and their similarity reports.

To browse by students, click on the Students tab.

By clicking on a student’s name, you can view all assignments in which the student is enrolled and all similarity reports generated as a result of the student’s self-check attempts.