Similarity matched to student essay but is a public webpage
Hello,
I have noticed that Tii matches essays with other student work, rather than with the original source, which is a public website. I am able to easily find these sources simply by googling. In the attached screenshot, I am referring to instances such as #7 and 8, which were from cliffsnotes.com, but came up only as being from a student essay. There were other examples in this essay as well.
This is a problem because if I were to follow up on this, I'd have to contact the teacher and wait for their reply, which may or may not come. It would also be easy for the student to claim, rightly, that it is highly unlikely that they would have plagiarized a paper from a school in another country. 
Is there a way to know if the similarity matches more than one source? I tried with "All sources," but no luck. There is far too much there anyway to be realistically helpful.
If it's not possible, it would make more sense to match it to the web first and the database second. This could be something to consider in future updates.
Happy holidays!
3 replies
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Hi Nicola Philpott I agree that this can sometimes be problematic. The 'all sources' version of the report should do exactly that and list all sources which have been found. However, I'll pass your comments on to our Product Manager who is working on updating the features of the Similarity Report.
Happy holidays to you too!
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This has been an ongoing problem for us as we publish successful PhD theses on an open access repository. When work submitted matches against one of these, the instructor is shown a match against the submission made as part of assessing the thesis rather than the published work, so they generate a paper view request.