FAQS: Faculty and Staff

In order to use the plagiarism feature in Grammarly, it is important that you use the correct URL to access Grammarly.  Make sure you are using the URL that includes "sso".  This ensures you are accessing the academic version of Grammarly that is connected with the Rasmussen institutional account.

https://sso.grammarly.com/saml/login?ssoId=a6dbc8a3-f69c-4772-9ca2-a326d1332c8d

It is important to remember that a tool like Grammarly (or TurnItIn) are simply text-matching software.  Grammarly scans the free web and compares the content you provide to what it finds on the internet.  It will produce alerts for areas where the text matches an internet source.

Grammarly does not scan content that is behind pay walls or require a log-in (like library article databases) and it does not have the ability to scan previous student work.

1. Log in to your Grammarly account
   1. If you don't have one, you can create your own account.  Follow the instructions here: How do I create a Grammarly account?
2. Once you are logged in, click on "Go to Editor" in the upper right hand corner of the web page.
3. Click on the New option with the piece of paper icon.    
4. Copy the student paper and paste the contents into the Grammarly window
5. A pop up may appear asking you to set goals for the Grammarly review. You can simply close out of this since you are only using Grammarly to check for plagiarism at this time.
6. Click on "Plagiarism" in the bottom right hand corner of the web page.
7. Grammarly may take a few minutes to scan the entire document for matches.
8. Once the scan is complete, you will see that Grammarly tells you what percentage of the content it identified as matching with content from the internet. 
9. It is very important to remember that Grammarly will identify text-matches and does not identify actual plagiarism.  Grammarly does not know if the content includes a proper in-text citation to attribute where the information came from.
10. At this point you can click through each alert to see what content has been flagged and which website it matched with. In the example below you can see this passage matches in 2 places and you can click the arrow to view both.
11. It is important to keep in mind that just because Grammarly flagged a passage as being plagiarized, it doesn't mean that it is definitely plagiarism. For examples of how to interpret the text matches in the plagiarism report, visit out Answer Grammarly: What percentage is acceptable when running the plagiarism checker?

The article How to Turn a Check for Plagiarism Into a Teachable Moment provides some good advice on how to work with students after identifying plagiarism.

• Send a personalized email to the student, explain the issue, and remind them about references and paraphrasing, and the nuances of intellectual property
• Share the plagiarism report with the student so they can see the matches for themselves. This is beneficial because
  • It separates the action from the person and gives us a “thing” to talk about rather than what they did intentionally or unintentionally.
  • There is a benefit to seeing how easily and thoroughly tools like Grammarly are in finding content matches.

The Rasmussen University online library has several ebooks if you would like additional information on plagiarism:

Neville, C. (2010). The complete guide to referencing and avoiding plagiarism (Vol. 2nd ed). McGraw-Hill Education. https://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&AuthType=ip,shib&db=nlebk&AN=466515&site=eds-live

Pecorari, D. (2013). Teaching to avoid plagiarism : How to promote good source use. McGraw-Hill Education. https://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&AuthType=ip,shib&db=nlebk&AN=524795&site=eds-live

Blum, S. D. (2009). My word! : Plagiarism and college culture. Cornell University Press. https://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&AuthType=ip,shib&db=nlebk&AN=673708&site=eds-live