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Why you should never settle for a free Plagiarism Checker

Why you should never settle for a free Plagiarism Checker

Plagiarism is the act of copying someone else’s work and passing it off as your own.
It’s a major and growing problem across all sectors. Artists and writers have been caught up in copying scandals. Corporations have been sued for huge sums of money, and creators such as designers, bloggers and Youtubers have been shamed and had their careers ruined due to content theft.

But probably the most substantial ramifications of plagiarism falls upon universities. They can suffer tarnished reputations, financial loss and legal action due to students attempts at cheating. As you can imagine, universities take every case of suspected cheating very seriously, and as a result, students suspected of copying have failed courses or even been expelled from the university entirely.

How is plagiarism detected?

Universities use various pieces of software known as ‘plagiarism scanners’ to cross reference students work against public sources on the web such as sites, files and academic documents. If duplicate content is found at an amount above a threshold that is deemed coincidental, then a manual check is triggered.  Experts will pick through the suspected work in an attempt to determine to what extent copying has occurred, and if it was deliberate.

Do I need to check my work?

You, as well as almost every other student, would never knowingly copy another person’s work. So why would you need a plagiarism scanner?
Maybe you incorrectly or forgot to cite the relevant information. Maybe you used a sentence or phrase that you believed to be common knowledge but it should have been referenced. Or maybe you came to a conclusion independently, and wrote what you believed to be a completely original sentence, that unfortunately just so happens to have been written down by someone else before you.
Every day, students submit work that could be laden with these types of unintentional plagiarisms that would cause at best, an awkward meeting with their university, or at worst, penalties and punitive actions.
To confirm your work is entirely original, all citations are correct, and have complete confidence that your work contains no accidental plagiarism that your university will detect, check your work with a quality scanner.

Are free Scanners worth it?

Free scanners may look like an attractive option for students looking for a cheap way to check their work. But as is often the case, you get what you pay for. While there is no way to determine exactly how a particular scanner operates, other than the claims they make, there are many reasons why you probably shouldn’t use a free scanner.

Low quality scans. To keep costs down, free scanners can cut corners where it really matters. For example, instead of doing an extensive scan, they may just perform a basic search engine query on each sentence in a given paper. While it may be adequate in some cases, this corner cutting scanning method is unlikely to find every instance of plagiarism that the universities scanners would. Which can result in students unwittingly submitting work that includes unintentional plagiarism.

Mis-handled work. Headlines about companies selling or leaking their users data have been all over the news recently. Each time you upload your intellectual property, such as photos or documents, you are handing over control of your data, and that comes with inherent risks. It’s in the best interest of payed services to protect your work at all costs, and be completely transparent about how it is being used, as their entire business model depends on users trust. The same can’t be said for free scanners, that rely on other ways to generate revenue to cover their operating costs and turn a profit. Don’t risk having your work mis-handled, sold or leaked.

Data harvesting. You’ve probably encountered this many times before; offers of free software or services. All you have to do is enter some details like your email or create an account. While sometimes genuine, it is often just an attempt to harvest valuable data from you that can then be sold to people that use it for all sorts of malicious purposes. From adding your email to spam and phishing lists, to attempting to hack into your accounts on other websites, in hopes that your have used the same or similar emails and password combinations elsewhere.

What scanner should I use?

By this point I hope to have convinced you that scanning your work is necessary, and that free scanners just aren’t worth the risk. So what are your options?
There are plenty of working scanners out there, but they often come with complex or unfair pricing structures. Some require you to pay for higher tier packages to get what you really need, some lock you into paying for a monthly or annual contract. Some even let you scan, but won’t tell you where it detected the sources of plagiarism from.

That’s why we created Clonewolf. A new and innovative scanner built on the principles of simplicity and fairness. Clonewolf offers a more accurate and wider reaching web search for public sources than our main competitors. Our pricing is simple, honest. You purchase a credit, that credit can then be used at any time to scan your text of up to 5,000 words. That’s it. No subscriptions, no confusing pricing tiers, and no hidden fees. Just pay for as many or as few scans as you need.
Coupled with our unique, state-of-the-art Natural Language Processing (NLP) algorithms and great support, we believe we have built the best and fairest scanner on the market. That’s why Clonewolf is becoming the scanner of choice for students in 2019.
Click here to find out why we believe we have made the best scanner on the market

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