CopyCatch Gold has been in use for many years in educational institutions both at department level and campus-wide and has a growing number of commercial users. It is primarily aimed at collusion detection, but can be used anywhere there is a requirement to check on the independent production of documents. It can handle large class sizes very quickly and provides immediate feedback, making it suitable for classroom or one-to-one use.

CopyChecker, which comes free with CopyCatch Gold, is designed to be used by students to learn how to use sources appropriately. It works best when used alongside CopyCatch. Both programs provide the same reports, but CopyChecker only allows the use of a limited number of sources, as is appropriate for answering an essay, and includes a Freehand page, where student can write without looking at their sources to discover how much more difficult it is to plagiarise accidentally if they don’t have the books open in front of them.

5-star rated Collusion and Plagiarism detection program.
Campus Licencing Cost from around 10p per student per annum.
Departmental Licences available.

MarkUp

Sentence and vocabulary full text views.
Vocabulary view shows the similarity of usage in all sentences.

Sentence view, shown here, shows the changes between source and work.

Easy MarkUp operations.
Simply press the radio buttons to see files side by side or just the matching sentences as shown here. Full cross-referencing by Paragraph/Sentence of related sentences in all views.
[P2 S2] (The 2nd sentence of Paragraph 2 in Barry) matches up with
{P6 S1} (The 1st sentence of Paragraph 6 in Bill on the right). Note the different quote styles used here and also further down.

Simple saving in RTF or HTML format preserving colours.

Across Files

The Across Files Screen shows the content words shared by sentences occurring in two or more of the files in complete class sets. These words are shown in the left box.

Highlighting any of the word lists shows you on the right which files have sentences with these words in common.

The idea is that where students share sentence content, these words might be useful for searching the web.

So you can see that Student 2 and Student 3 share a number of words in the highlighted sentence. Searching for those would lead you to the source, Spark Notes (named Achebe 4.txt).

To illustrate this, the web sources have been included to show the effect across a number of closely related texts.

The line below the highlighted one shows that Student 3 is very heavily dependent on the source, where Student 2 has borrowed less. [soft, violent, productive, adamantly, brave, wealthy, ideals, conversation, adopts, perceives, opposed, consciously, emotion, becomes] are found in Student 3 and Spark Notes Achebe 4.

Single File

The Single File Screen shows the result of pressing the Analyse Single File button on the front screen. Any files selected in the work file box will be examined as individual texts. This is the only non-comparative element in CopyCatch.

This is generally used where the reader thinks that there may other hands at work in the essay but can’t easily find the source or sources.

The screen shows in red sentences which seem to the program to fit less well with the rest of the text and so might be candidates for Search Engine look up.

Choosing whole sentences, clauses or sets of words from the red sentences can find a source.

For example, you could highlight the first clause in the red sentence on the example screen, Okonkwo is a tragic hero in the classical sense and press Ctrl-C to copy it. When you feed this into Google with quote marks surrounding it, you will probably only get a couple of hits, and the first will almost certainly be Spark Notes.

Where multiple sources are suspected, this screen can help you find a number of them in turn.