Viper plagiarism, free Turnitin alternative? - Review

It is the time of year when term papers are coming due and students are worrying more than ever about being accused of plagiarism. It’s the busy season for plagiarism detection services both for teachers and for students and, as is typical, I get asked my opinions on them.

One email recently asked me my thoughts on the Viper Anti-Plagiarism Scanner, a free application and service provided by Scan My Essay. I’ve been familiar with the service for a while but never bothered to test it. However, since it was requested I decided to put the application through a few of my paces.

Unfortunately, the results were less than spectacular and, truth be told the application fell almost completely flat. The only question is whether the problems were glitches caused by a temporary problems or something more chronic with the program.

How it Works?

The idea behind VIper is that you download the small application, less than 1MB, and register for an account with the service. Once you’ve done that, you simply select the file or files you want to check for plagiarism and send Viper on its way. Viper, after some processing, will come back with the results.

Though the process is simple, and familiar to anyone who has used a plagiarism checker in the past, it does have a few interesting features. One of the biggest being its ability to match against a local database, the Web or both. This means that, if you have a pool of content you want to test against, you can do that with or without also checking the broader Web.

Also, the results page also uses a very effective layout, showing the uploaded work side-by-side to the suspected matches. This is very convenient for analyzing the match and makes developing an opinion about whether an element is plagiarized or not very simple.

Beyond those two features, both of which can actually be found in other applications or services, the rest of the application is fairly straightforward. While that is not a bad thing in and of itself, the problem is that it doesn’t seem to do the job it set out to.

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