You may start to find that we expect a lot of you as a CBS student, and we do. However, we also set very high standards for ourselves as an organization, to make sure that you as a CBS student are on top of and understand the rules and regulations in place and that all students, regardless of their particular choice of degree, are treated exactly the same in terms of learning opportunities and performance requirements and expectations.
Finally, we strive to be transparent and democratic in the process of detecting undesired behavior.
OURIGINAL
One of the things that we do democratically is to screen all written assignments submitted through the Digital Exam platform for potentially problematic textual overlaps. To help us do this job we have hooked up with OURIGINAL, a text matching software. This software does not identify plagiarism as such, but it does alert professors to places that may warrant a bit of attention and it also serve as documentation if a concrete suspicion is aroused and the legal team needs to be involved.
To walk the talk on transparency, we invite you to take a tour of OURIGINAL. First, to see for yourself what it actually does and in this way demystify something that, shrouded in secrecy, may otherwise appear rather menacing. Second, to illustrate why being loyal, meticulous, and accurate when referencing external sources in your written assignments are of the essence as they may otherwise attract negative attention from OURIGINAL and in turn from your professors as cases of suspected plagiarism.
Especially two things in the OURIGINAL report are worth a bit of attention.
Matching text
These represent the instances when an overlap has been detected between your written assignment and an external source. OURIGINAL is programmed to find not only verbatim, or word-for-word, overlaps but also to identify cases where the original wording has been altered in some way, either through deletion, addition or replacement of individual words. Textual overlaps are not in and of themselves problematic; in fact, they may be perfectly fine if you have signaled clearly, through a formal citation, that the overlap originates with somebody else, somewhere else, cf. the section on correct referencing practices for more details. On the other hand, if this signal has been left out, whether by accident, sloppiness, or design, you open yourself up to accusations of plagiarism.
Warnings
If your document is formatted in a non-standard way, if you use a script that is unusual, or if your document is a scanned copy, that may render it unreadable in OURIGINAL, it will be flagged as suspicious by the software. Again, flagging does not necessarily mean trouble but to avoid this situation altogether, just make sure to hand in only approved formats and refrain from unorthodox formatting choices.
Joshua Kragh Amudzidis-Bruhn
jkb.lib@cbs.dk