What is Unicheck?

Unicheck Report

Enabling Unicheck in Moodle Assignment

Enabling Unicheck in Forum or Workshop Activity

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

Moodle Assignment

Moodle Forum

Moodle Workshop

How to Grade Assignments?

Can I Provide Feedback to Students?

How to Download Similarity Reports?

I Don’t Have an Option to Change Some Unicheck Settings

Supported Submission File Types

 

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 plugin can be integrated into Moodle LMS and used by instructors in the following activities: Moodle Assignment, Moodle Forum, and Moodle Workshop. After a student makes a submission, instructor receives a comprehensive similarity report, which becomes available within a few minutes.

Unicheck compares submitted documents or texts with the Internet and/or Unicheck Institutional Library (i.e., past assignments submitted to Unicheck).

Unicheck Report

Unicheck Report highlights all text segments that match Internet and/or 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.

Enabling Unicheck in Moodle Assignment 

STEP 1: Log in to Moodle using your Teacher account details and follow the standard Moodle procedure to create a new course/assignment.

STEP 2: In Submission settings drop-down list, set Require students to click the submit button option to Yes.

 

STEP 3: In Unicheck plagiarism plugin drop-down list, set Enable Unicheck Plagiarism Service option to Yes and adjust other settings as necessary.

 

• Enable Unicheck Plagiarism Service
  If enabled, new submissions will be automatically checked for plagiarism.
  
  
• Check already delivered assignment submissions
  Enable this option if you want to generate similarity reports for past submissions. Within a few minutes after you click Save changes, Unicheck will start a bulk check of all past submissions submitted for grading in this assignment.
  
  
• Add submissions to institutional library
  If enabled, student submissions will be saved to institution’s Unicheck account (Unicheck Institutional Library). New submissions will be checked against previously stored submissions if Library is set as the source for comparison.
  
  
• Sources for comparison
  (1) Internet: Unicheck will check submissions against Internet sources.
  (2) Library: Unicheck will check submissions against files stored in Unicheck Institutional Library, i.e. assignments submitted by other students and/or files directly uploaded to the Unicheck account by administrator.
  (3) Internet + Library: Unicheck will check submissions against Internet sources and Library sources.
  (4) External database (additional option): If your institution has connected an FTP server that stores additional text sources maintained by the institution, Unicheck will check submissions against such sources.
  
  
• Exclude sources with a match less than (%)
  Automatically exclude matched sources based on the set match percentage. For large texts like theses or dissertations, it is recommended to set the “%” value to “0” in order not to omit relevant matches. Excluded sources will not add to similarity score.
  
  
• Exclude sources with a match less than (words)
  Automatically exclude matched sources based on the set match word count. The minimum value is “8” (set a higher value to omit sources with longer matches). Excluded sources will not add to Similarity Score.
  
  
• Exclude references and citations
  If this option is enabled, Unicheck will search and highlight references and in-text citations (APA, MLA, Chicago/Turabian, Harvard). Detected references and citations will not be checked for plagiarism.
  
  
• Show similarity scores to student
  Enable this option to let students see similarity scores (for their own submissions only). 
  
  
• Show similarity reports to student
  Enable this option to let students see similarity reports (for their own submissions only).
  
  
• Notify students via email
  Enable this option to let students receive email notifications once the similarity check is finished. 
  
  
• Maximum number of files to be checked in archive
  Set a limit for the maximum number of files to be processed by Unicheck in a ZIP or RAR archive. The system will pick only file types supported by Unicheck.
  
  

STEP 4: Click Save changes to save assignment settings.

 

Enabling Unicheck in Forum or Workshop Activity

STEP 1: Log in to Moodle using your Teacher account details and follow the standard Moodle procedure to create a new Forum or Workshop activity.

 

STEP 2: In Unicheck plagiarism plugin drop-down list, set Enable Unicheck Plagiarism Service option to Yes and adjust other settings as necessary (this step is identical to STEP 3 in Enabling Unicheck in Moodle Assignment).

Note: Forum and Workshop submissions are not added to your institution’s Unicheck Library even if such option is selected.

 

STEP 3: Click Save changes to save the settings.

 

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

Unicheck Report is automatically generated within a few minutes after a student submits an assignment for grading.

Moodle Assignment

Once the similarity report is ready, the Report button and the similarity score will be displayed in the submissions list view and the submission grading view.

Click Report to view the online Unicheck Report.

 

 

 

Generating Reports for Previous Submissions

• Manual scan: Click Start a scan to manually check a submission that was made while the Unicheck plugin was disabled.

 

• Bulk scan: In assignment settings, enable the Check already delivered assignment submissions option. Within a few minutes after you click Save changes in assignment settings, Unicheck will start a bulk check of all past submissions submitted for grading.

 

Moodle Forum

When students post replies within a Forum activity, Unicheck Reports are automatically generated for the posted text and files. Click Report to view the online Unicheck Report.

 

When enabled, Unicheck automatically generates reports for all replies and files (you cannot check a specific reply and skip the others).

Note: Usually, students are allowed to edit posts in a Forum activity, and Unicheck generates a new report after every revision. When you make similarity score and/or Unicheck Report visible to students, some might be tempted to edit their posts to reduce the similarity score.

 

Moodle Workshop

For texts and files submitted within a Workshop activity, Unicheck Reports are automatically generated once instructor has switched the activity to Assessment Phase (students can no longer edit their submissions). Click Report to view the online Unicheck Report.

 

 

If you want to make students’ Unicheck results visible to their peers, please set the visibility setting(s) to Yes.

 

 

How to Grade Assignments?

You may grade assignments using standard Moodle workflow (from submissions list view or submission grading view).

 

 

 

Can I Provide Feedback to Students?

Option 1

Teachers can annotate students’ submissions directly using a native Moodle annotation tool, which works with text submissions (when “Comment inline” option is enabled) as well as PDF, docx, and odt files. Learn more.

A link to Unicheck Report will be displayed next to the submitted file(s).

Option 2

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. Your comments will be also added to the PDF Unicheck Report when you download it.
You can still use the Moodle annotation tool to comment on an assignment or use both.

 

Option 3

If you'd like to download student’s 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.

To enable this option, tick the Feedback files checkbox in assignment settings.

 

How to Download Similarity Reports?

When viewing an online similarity report, go to the Options Menu and click Download.

Choose one of the following options:

Download Original File: Download the originally submitted document. 

Download PDF Report: Download the Unicheck Report as a PDF file.

 

I Don’t Have an Option to Change Some Unicheck Settings

LMS administrators can configure permissions for teachers to change Unicheck settings. Please contact your LMS administrator if you are unable to change some desirable settings when creating a new Moodle activity.

 

 

Supported Submission File Types

Students can submit the following main file types (see the full list here):

• DOCX, DOCX, PPT, PPTX, XLS, XLSX
• TXT, RTF
• PDF
• PAGES (Apple document format)
• ODT, HTML, XML 

Students can also submit multiple files in ZIP and RAR* archives. Unicheck will display a similarity report for each file under a separate tab.

* Submission of RAR archives might be disabled. Please contact your LMS administrator to enable this feature.