By Susanne Clement Justesen, AAU Communication and Public Affairs. 
Graphic: Cecilie Karoline Kalbakk Elgaard, AAU Communication and Public Affairs.
Translated by LeeAnn Iovanni, AAU Communication and Public Affairs. 

AAU has taken an extra step to ensure good academic practice. As of 1 February, the university will use a new screening system, Originality, that will make it easier for examiners and departments to detect errors in source references and misuse of text passages from other works.

Violations of the rules on good academic practice are a challenge across higher education institutions, and therefore, like other universities, AAU uses a digital system to check exams for plagiarism and paraphrasing.

Originality offers several new features. Among other things, the system can analyze semantic similarity and thus identify content similarities rather than just direct word-for-word transcription. In addition, unlike before, plagiarism checks can be done on all text, mathematical formulas and programming source code in the document, regardless of whether it is scanned, inserted in an image or in a figure. 

Smooth start-up

According to Jørgen Søgaard Jakobsen, Head of Studie Digital, the new system has not experienced any problems.

"The new anti-plagiarism checker can handle much larger volumes of text than the previous system and is also fast, easy and intuitive for assessors to use. Technically, the system has run smoothly since its launch. We hope that this good start will continue, and that the new system will raise academic quality and strengthen our work on academic integrity," he says.