University professors, teachers and professionals across the web are reacting to the news that Unicheck, a well-known academic plagiarism detector, will be no more as of December 31st, 2023:
Bought by commercial plagiarism checking company Turnitin in 2000, Unicheck was a popular academic plagiarism detector used in online learning management systems like Canvas. Because the service was a common part of the Canvas learning suite, no longer having access to it means that professors and professionals alike are wondering if there’s a Unicheck alternative that can do as good of a job (if not better) than Unicheck.
They had some glimmer of hope, when well-known Swedish plagiarism checking tool Urkund and plagiarism scanning software PlagScan merged to become Ouriginal. You can see which countries tended to use which plagiarism checkers the most below:
It was hoped that through Ouriginal, professors once again had a reliable way of scanning for plagiarism. However, the merger was not to last, as Turnitin bought Ouriginal, leaving the worldwide academic plagiarism checker market rather barren:
Once the purchase was complete, Turnitin set about discontinuing Unicheck, instead nudging users over to its pay-as-you-go university plagiarism checker. Having a portfolio of similarly-focused products can muddy the brand recognition waters, so it’s likely that Turnitin has set about combining their capabilities with its own to become the de-facto standard in the academic plagiarism world.
Unfortunately, as professors, teachers and other content publishers around the world are quickly realizing, anti-plagiarism checkers do a terrible job at uncovering instances of AI-written content.
But that’s precisely where Originality.AI shines.
Plagiarism checker. AI-writing checker. Readability. Originality.AI can handle them all simultaneously or as one-off checks. With prices starting at just 1 cent per 100 words scanned, it’s a cost-effective and easy way to use the latest in language modeling, machine learning and algorithm advances to detect writing that is anything but original. And although Originality.AI isn’t baked in to learning management systems like Canvas or Blackboard, it nevertheless scans quickly and intuitively for all types of plagiarism and AI-written content, helping you to quickly zero in on instances of plagiarism beyond simple similarity tests.
Now that you know more about the fate of Unicheck, you may be looking at other plagiarism detectors as Unicheck alternatives. We’ve done the work for you in reviewing some of the most popular plagiarism checkers and writing tools including Grammarly, Copyleaks, SafeAssign and many more, and how they compare to Originality.
We’ve also got details on plagiarism in the digital age and what to watch for, so that you can get up-to-speed quickly on the ever-changing developments of AI and get a more concrete understanding of the modern answer to the question “What is plagiarism?”