Assignments tool from Google will now check plagiarism and citation errors of students

Google is introducing a new grading software, Assignments for teachers of higher Education who use G Suit for Education. The aim of it is to identify plagiarism quickly than ever.

Previously it was called Coursework, but the name has changed with a few additions however, the primary purpose is still the same. Assignments will let the instructor create coursework for their students, assign them, and then help in marking it, using Google Docs and Drive.

It is a kind of litmus test for plagiarism which will create “originality report” whenever students will submit their work through Assignments and Classroom.
"Assignments brings together the capabilities of Google Docs, Drive and Search into a new tool for collecting and grading student work. It helps you save time with streamlined assignment workflows, ensure student work is authentic with originality reports, and give constructive feedback with comment banks.", explained Jorge Lugo Software Engineer, Google Assignments.
The company said teachers often copy-paste the students’ work to Google Search to check whether they have copied it from somewhere or not. It does not always give accurate result as it is not only repetitive but could also be biased.



The new feature will scan students’ assignments against thousands of web pages and books to check plagiarism. Grading tools have a new Search feature added that will save teachers’ time of pointing out the absence of citation and if the work is paraphrased improperly.

Brian Hendrick, Product Manager for G Suit for Education, said marking and grading students’ work will be more comfortable and quicker with these new tools.


Students will also benefit from this as they will be able to generate originality report three times before submitting their work. This will help them revise their work if there is any plagiarism involved. The originality report for teachers will be generated after the work has been submitted by students. The tool will highlight the uncited text and two paragraphs that will have the same texts to a great extent.



There are many other online tools available as well that check the plagiarism of work against several webpages using the Google API. One of the popular tools is PaperRater which is powered by Artificial Intelligence.

Tough it is a little irony that Google has first developed the dependency of searching everything and then adding the plagiarism check. However, it is a helpful addition for teachers using G Suit for Education, as the company is working on various tools for Education.

The beta version of Assignments is available that teachers can sign up for. Whereas, it will go live for G Suit for Education by the end of fall this year.

Read next: Google allows users to log in without password
Previous Post Next Post