At the beginning of December the plagiarism prevention software URKUND was tested by EAMT at the initiative of the Department of Musicology, Music Pedagogy and Cultural Management. The assessment confirmed that it is a modern and efficient tool, which can be used to fairly quickly find information on the Internet that might correspond to the texts the students have written. In January a decision was made to start using the paid service of URKUND. The service is provided in Estonia by the Education and Youth Board on the basis of a consortium agreement. Payment for the service is based on the number of students at the educational institution.

URKUND is often mistakenly called as a plagiarism detection software. In fact, it helps to find matches between student’s text and an online text, but possible plagiarism must be identified by the user of the software. Above all, URKUND is helpful in preventing plagiarism by ascertaining the originality and correctness of the work before the evaluation of the student work.

Homoglyphs can be used for disguising plagiarized text by replacing letters in source texts with visually identical letters from other scripts. URKUND notifies the user about the existence of such homoglyphs.

To use URKUND, the text needing evaluation must be sent from the authorized e-mail address to the URKUND server. An analysis report will be returned via email. As this is first and foremost a measure for preventing plagiarism, it will also benefit students who can use URKUND to check the originality and correctness of their work. To do this, the student must send his/her work to the e-mail address of his/her lecturer’s URKUND account. The analysis report is then sent to both the student and the teacher. EAMT faculty members may receive their URKUND account address by writing to Eerik Jõks at eerik.joks@eamt.ee.

Researcher Brigitta Davidjants and lecturer Eerik Jõks assisted in testing URKUND at EAMT.