It is essential to distinguish between the e-mail based Urkund system and tools produced by other companies, where individual teachers log on to a website and upload submitted student documents themselves in order to check them for plagiarism. The most important differences are described below.

Workload
Because of e-mail being the basis of the Urkund system, every student document can be checked for plagiarism without any extra workload on the teacher.

A tool that requires the teachers to select and upload documents, on the other hand, causes a growing workload for the teacher with each analysis. If every student document is supposed to be checked, then a tool requires a huge effort by the teachers. If a tool is the method chosen for plagiarism control it is likely that very few documents end up being checked.

Selection
The Urkund system requires no selection of candidates to be checked – every document that is submitted goes through the system. Therefore Urkund maximizes the level of detection while on the same time avoiding arbitrary or even biased selection of documents to be checked. With a tool that require a selection by the teacher, only those documents (if random selection is not used) that the teachers suspects contains plagiarism will be checked.

Which documents that are checked for plagiarism will always depend on the individual teacher’s ability to identify instances of plagiarism, the time and work effort that can be spared for making such decisions and the capriciousness that defines spot checks.

These factors leads up to a certain arbitrariness in the quality of the control. The teachers will make their own judgments on what is to be regarded as suspicious instances of plagiarism and the willingness to spend time and effort on checking these documents will wary greatly among them. Such a selection process also risk directing unwarranted suspicion on otherwise underachieving groups of students.

Checks based on teacher selection is on top of this an ineffective method to deal with the large cases of plagiarism that hides in the statistics. This is because the hidden statistics encompass the plagiarism that pass through the teacher’s initial screening, and a tool that relies on this initial screening therefore won’t solve this problem.

Discovery
Urkund checks all submitted documents. This maximizes the frequency of detection. Every system or tool that requires a selection to be made has a lower level of detection.

                                                                                Preventive Effect >>