Control Plagiarism with SurfWax's Plagiarism Guard™ Copyright © 2002-2007 SurfWax Inc. Menlo Park, CA. All rights reserved. Patents pending. (Please scroll down to see the simple steps for checking plagiarism with Plagiarism Guard) Plagiarism Guard is seamlessly integrated into the SurfWax Scholar process. Scholar is a Web-based service that offers four keys tools in one process: safe Web searching, digital lockers to save and share documents, Plagiarism Guard, and secure intra-school/district email for students and staff. Plagiarism Guard automatically checks students' work against sources on the Web and optionally against documents submitted by other students at the school/district. Plagiarism Guard then creates a simple comparison summary of matches from which the teacher can view details. SurfWax Scholar offers online tutorials for students on how to properly cite/reference documents, how to create a Bibliography (MLA), and a self-paced quiz. A documents is checked by Plagiarism Guard when it is saved by the student to a teacher-created Submissions Folder that is part of the teacher's digital locker (InfoCubby). A teacher can create numerous Submissions folders, for example, for homework, for drafts, for final papers, etc. To learn how to create this kind of folder, please see the reference on Submissions Folders. Only teachers can open/view documents placed in a Submissions folder. Submission folder titles appear in red to help differentiate these folders. Students can add documents to a Submissions folder only if a teacher shares the folder with the with student(s); to learn how to share a folder with students, please see the Teachers: Share Folders reference.

Once a document has been placed in a Submissions Folder, it will be automatically checked by Plagiarism Guard, usually within two hours. Once a document has been checked, it will be updated in the Submissions folder with an icon next to it, either a or or . The icon indicates the level of matched (copied) phrases between the student's document and source documents. A document with a icon next to it indicates that the student's work passed; that Plagiarism Guard did not find any Original Source documents containing similar content. Note: Plagiarism Guard relies upon Internet conditions and sub-phrases to find matches between documents. Under certain circumstances, matches might not be found (missed positive) and SurfWax, like all plagiarism services, can not guarantee 100% matches. Our tests show a 95% confidence level, and our interviews with teachers and students indicate that plagiarism checking, when part of an integrated research process like SurfWax Scholar, greatly reduces a student's inclination to plagiarize. A document with either the or the icon next to it indicates that Plagiarism Guard found Web pages or documents that match content in the student's document. A school (and teacher) can set the threshold values for the yellow and red icons (default setting: yellow means 2 or less matched phrases, red means 3 or more). A teacher's time is limited and Plagiarism Guard is designed to minimize the time required to check plagiarism results. With just three levels of matching (green, yellow, red), a teacher can quickly tell if a student's work needs further review. If so, the teacher clicks either the yellow or red icon to see more. When the teacher clicks either the yellow or red icon, a Plagiarism Guard Summary Report opens in a new browser window with a summary of all the documents found that have phrases that match phrases from the student's document. In the example below, seven matches were found. The teacher uses their own judgment to decide if they want to check further. To see the original work, they can click on any of the URLs listed under Original Sources. To see a detailed, side-by-side, highlighted comparison of the student's document versus an Original Source, the teacher clicks View. When the teacher clicks View, a side-by-side Comparison Report opens, showing the student's work on the left and the source on the right. Each phrase that occurs in both documents is highlighted in yellow. Each of these phrases is numbered to help the teacher find the respective phrases in each document since the order of the phrase in the student's work may not follow that of the original work. The teacher determines if the Comparison Report reveals plagiarism per their classroom or the school's policy. The teacher decides the appropriate action to take based on the detail of the comparison. Teachers are encouraged to refer students to the SurfWax Scholar online tutorials to learn more about choosing, citing, and referencing original sources.