The Number 1 Reason to NOT post your essay here: PLAGIARISM CHECKERS

There is a sticky thread on this forum about why to NOT publish your essay here and most of the reasons have to do with others stealing your ideas or even your essay. But even if no one does that, there is an even more important reason: Plagiarism Checkers are often used, especially now with electronic submissions. And the plagiarism checker will find YOUR OWN ESSAY online and mark your submission as plagiarized.

I took one of the essays recently published in this forum of CC and ran it through a common plagiarism checker The result that came back: “WE HAVE DETECTED SIGNIFICANT PLAGIARISM IN THIS TEXT.” We don’t use real names here, so when a college gets back a report that an essay is plagiarized, there’s no way they can tell that you were the original author, even if they try to follow up, which they might not have the time or inclination to do. You’re majorly screwed by your own essay!

Fair warning.

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If you message it to people though theres no way for the scanner to detect it, right?

Correct… PM’ing the essay is OK

Wow. Good information. Bump for all the rising seniors.

I suspect new members may get confused about this because it is OK to post practice SAT essays. It’s important to notice the distinction.

I’ve been telling kids on CC not to post their essays for these reasons. Do we have a sticky thread for this subject yet?

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Does this include PM’s or not?

What plagiarism checker did you use?

If you delete the posts is it ok?

Not PM.

@DrGoogle So if I were to PM my essay to someone, it would not show up in a plagiarism checker?

It would not.

PMs are safe (assuming you don’t send it to a creep).

You can’t delete a post here. You have 20 minutes to edit your content. That’s really not long enough to let someone read it before you delete the important parts.

Ok thanks!

A moderator can delete a post; but the best thing would be to not post an essay.

Another strategy to handling this would be to digitally sign your essay each time you post it. You can have your cake–anonymity–and eat it too–public review of your essay with little worry about plagiarism (keep your key safe). As an aside, I would imagine this would get you points if you’re applying for a CS program at a polytechnic.

Probably false assumption: they would contact you for clarification if they thought you’d copied other people’s work.

Additional probably false assumption: they would understand digital signing enough to understand its non-repudiation properties.

Any websites that can check plagiarism for you??

google plagiarism checker

What if I PM people a link to a google docs?

so if we do post it, how do we delete the post? or is it too late