We are excited to announce the full enablement of Originality Reports within Google Classroom across our district! This powerful tool is designed to help foster a culture of academic integrity by making it easier for both students and teachers to check for potential plagiarism.
The Core Function: What is the Report Checking?
As of early November, when this feature was fully enabled, a secure repository of student work from our district (HTPS student work) has been established. This repository consists of assignments turned in through Google Classroom by HTPS students.
- When a teacher turns on the Originality Report setting for a Google Classroom assignment, the submitted student work will be checked against three main sources:
- Billions of web pages.
- Books and academic journals.
- Our internal HTPS student work repository.
Important Note: What This Tool is NOT
It is crucial to understand that the Originality Report is designed to check for textual matches against existing databases.
Originality Reports are NOT an AI plagiarism checker. They will not tell you if a student used a generative AI tool (like Gemini) to write their essay. This tool focuses on text that matches external or internal sources, not on the originality of the writing process itself.
Empowering Students to Self-Correct
The most valuable feature of Originality Reports is its instructional potential. If the teacher enables the check before the assignment is posted:
- Students will have up to three opportunities to run the report on their work before submitting the assignment.
- This allows them to immediately see flagged sections, paraphrase better, and add proper citations before the teacher ever sees the final product.
Teacher View: The Review Dashboard
If you do not want students to have the opportunity to run their own check, you can run the report after all assignments have been submitted.
Once the report is run, you will see the results underneath the student's name in the assignment dashboard. This will indicate whether the Originality Reports have flagged any areas of concern (matching text percentage). When you click on the report:
- The report highlights the text that matches a source.
- The dashboard will show you which source has the matching text, including any documents within our internal HTPS repository, allowing you to click to view the source.
