Once I was asked to do a 25-slide presentation for a uni project. All us students were advised to follow a generic assessment policy and submit our presentations onto a plagiarism detection website.
I was aiming to get this assignment done early to allow myself some time to deal with any potential issues. Excited, I came up with a creative high-quality presentation ready to be submitted before the deadline.
I attempted to upload my work to the system to get it checked for plagiarism as per instructions provided by the university. The website showed the remaining time for the file to be submitted was 25 minutes. I’m no IT expert, so I didn’t think that was an issue and decided to wait.
After half an hour, the website showed a message that the file was too large to be uploaded. My first thought was to cut the content to reduce the file size, but I didn’t want a technical issue to affect the quality of my work. There had to be another way.
I converted my presentation to a different format and shrank the size, clicked ‘submit’ and hoped for the best.
Another error message popped up: “The file format is not supported by the website.” On top of that, I then discovered that this system only allowed students to submit their work 3 times. I had one last chance that could not be wasted on another error.
I spent some time looking for another solution on the university website. Its advice to deal with difficulties like mine was to upload the assignment to a file storage platform and submit the link in a Word document. Following the advice, I attempted to submit again. Next minute, the submission portal indicated that there were not enough words in the document for it to be uploaded. I had no attempts left and it was way past midnight.
Eventually, I had to directly email the link for my presentation to the lecturer in charge, who then had to assess my work from there without a plagiarism check anyway. By the time this happened, I had no positive or excited feelings left about the presentation I was working so hard on because they’d all been sucked out of me by the website issue.
The university puts a great emphasis on originality of students’ work, but its rules and systems simply fail to appreciate students’ effort and provide sufficient support. There’s a clear mismatch between the university’s assessment policy and the requirements for this particular assignment, and probably others as well. Given that the plagiarism detection software has file size restrictions, how can us students be expected to submit assignments without specific instructions on how to submit them? The reasons why universities check assignments for plagiarism are obvious and undebatable but the value of support and guidance provided to students should not be underestimated.
