How Teachers Can Check Originality Verification of Power Point Presentations (3 Steps)

By Stephanie Ellen

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Plagiarism is when a written work is presented as an original work when it has been copied from someone else. It doesn't have to be the entire work; if chunks of an original work are copied without attribution, it's still considered to be plagiarism. Although many plagiarism detectors are on the market that can catch copied texts, few of the systems can handle PowerPoint presentations. If you want to check whether your students have plagiarized a PowerPoint presentation, you can use a few different websites to accomplish this task.

Step 1

Navigate to the ImageMagick website (see Resources) and visually compare the two PowerPoint presentations. Before you upload the presentation, export the slides to JPG or PNG and then type "composite -blend 50 file1.jpg file2.jpg composite1.jpg" on the command line. The program will make a composite of the two PowerPoint presentations so that you can see how they overlay. The software is free to use.

Step 2

Click on the Plagiarism Resource Site (see Resources). The WCopyfind software will look at a series of files you specify; the program compares the files and generates an HTML report of matching text. Although WCopyFind can compare two PowerPoint presentations, it cannot search the Internet to find a matching file. Therefore, it is useful for detecting plagiarism from within groups of people (like a class of students) but it cannot find plagiarism from outside sources. The software is free to use.

Step 3

Cut and paste the document into Turn It In (see Resources). Turn It In is plagiarism detection software that is the standard for many schools, colleges and universities; as of October 2010, 800,000 instructors use Turn It In to check for plagiarized work. The software takes the cut-and-pasted text and compares it with millions of other documents already submitted to the system; it also performs a check against billions of files indexed on the Internet. Although it cannot find plagiarized images, the software will detect plagiarized text. To use Turn It In, you must obtain a login from your college department or school.

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