The most important measures taken against plagiarism are those that are preventive; those that prevents plagiarism from occurring in the first place.

Urkund generates a very strong preventive effect. A number of factors contribute to this:

The integration of a system such as Urkund sends a clear message throughout the organization that plagiarism will not be tolerated and that the resource to counter it has been acquired. The fact that the students themselves are going to send their documents through the system helps magnify the preventive effect that follows.

The possibility to easily check every submitted document creates a preventive effect because students knows that that there is small chances that their document will not be checked. With a tool where documents are checked only if the teacher suspects something, or if they are selected in a random sample, this preventive effect does not happen. The students know that they may likely avoid being checked if they rid their documents of typical tell tale signs of plagiarism.

Urkund compares submitted documents with all kind of sources. This strenghtens the preventive effect because there are no safe areas to plagiarize from. Tools that performs checks only against the Internet does not create the same effect because the students realize that they may safely copy from other areas, such as non-published student material or published material in general (journals, books, encyclopedias etc).

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