Back in August Google unveiled Originality Reports as a beta product in Google Classroom. According to an email that landed in my domain administrator account this afternoon, Originality Reports will be available in all G Suite for Education domains beginning on January 21st.

Originality Reports in Google Classroom will let you check documents for elements of plagiarism originality against the millions of webpages and books that are indexed by Google. Students are able to run Originality Reports on their own work before submitting it as an assignment in Google Classroom.

Teachers who are in G Suite for Education domains can activate Originality Reports on up to three assignments within a Google Classroom. Teachers who are in a G Suite for Education Enterprise domain (the paid, upgraded version of G Suite for Education) can use Originality Reports on as many assignments as they like.

Using Originality Reports as a Teacher
If you’re like me and most teachers who use G Suite for Education, you’re probably using the free version of G Suite for Education and therefore will only be able to use Originality Reports on three assignments. That’s why I foresee it only being used on long and infrequent assignments like research papers and not on short and frequent assignments. For shorter assignments I’ll just use the good old standard of, “that doesn’t sound like something student X would write” and then copy and paste a phrase or two into Google search to check for plagiarism.