Students regularly incorporate external inspiration into their writing and avoid plagiarism by attributing credit to the appropriate source. Originality reports, included with the Teaching and Learning Upgrade and Education Plus editions, empower students to do their best work by fostering academic integrity. You also have the option to check student work against previous assignments in your domain by enabling the Student Matches feature in this Google Classroom resource.
In this article, you will learn how to:
Enable student matches for prior student work
Enabling student matches
School matches allow Originality reports to compare assignments against previous student submissions within a Google Workspace domain. Once enabled, in addition to assessing student work against billions of web pages and books, Originality reports will also scan your Google Drive data for potential misconduct.
- To enable student matches, ensure the Classroom Teacher Permissions are set to Verified teachers only.
Apps > Google Workspace > Classroom > General Settings > Teacher Permissions
Note: Selecting Verified teachers only ensures that only the Teacher OU level has school matches enabled. Later in setup, Classroom creates a shared drive private repository owned by the domain, and non-delegated users cannot access the shared drive.
- In the navigation path at the top of the page, click settings for Classroom to return to the Classroom settings.
- Click the Originality Reports section.
- Apply the Enable originality reports school matches setting at the root level by checking the box.
- Applying this setting does not automatically create the shared drive to house the repository of work to compare against. Instead, the shared drive gets created when a teacher or student runs the first Originality report after enabling school matches.
- To create the shared drive and build the repository, create an assignment with Originality reports enabled in any Google Classroom class. Once a student submits work to the assignment and runs an Originality report, the institution-owned repository gets created in a private, hidden shared drive. Information from student submissions gets stored in this drive from this point forward.
Enabling student matches for prior student work
To compare Originality reports against student work submitted before applying the school matches setting, admins who have delegated access to the repository can request that staff designate them as viewers to any Classroom folders with files they wish to add. Once the admin has viewer access to those folders, they can copy them into the new shared drive repository, Originality Corpus, for comparison.
Managing shared drives
Since the best practice is to maintain control in your domain over who can create shared drives, enabling school matches is an opportunity to ensure permissions are limited to assigned admins. Be sure to set up the shared drive using the preferred method of creating a configuration group.
- Launch a new tab in your browser and click on this link. The Classroom school matches admin page opens. There are two sections on this page: Service Accounts and Shared Drives.
- Under the Service Accounts section, copy the email address which is listed.
- Switch back to the tab with the Admin console open and go to Directory > Groups.
- Once in Groups, click Create group to create a configuration group with the email for this service account, just copied from the previous tab, as the owner of the group. This step prevents the need to enable all domain users to create shared drives and avoid shared drive sprawl.
- Now that you've created the configuration group navigate to
Apps > Google Workspace > Drive and Docs > Sharing settings. - On the left side of the screen, select the newly created group.
- Click on the Shared drive creation section to expand it.
- Deselect the Prevent users in <your domain> from creating new shared drives setting.
Note: If not using the configuration group method, this setting would be deselected at the root but that would allow anyone in the domain to create shared drives and could lead to shared drive sprawl.
- To finish the setup process, deselect Prevent non-members of the shared drive from accessing files as well for this group. This will allow teachers to see matches across the institution’s domain, not just for their classes.
- Click Save.
Originality reports add so much value to a student’s EdTech experience, and the school matches feature supports their growth as learners. As a final thought, institutions should also weigh their retention policies in Vault. If the retention policy on student Google Drive files is anything other than indefinitely, consider how long those records should be retained and be available for school matches for Originality reports in Google Classroom.
If your institution currently has the Teaching and Learning Upgrade or Education Plus edition, ensure to configure your Google Admin console to support the school matches feature before enabling it.
Contact your Google Customer Success Specialist if you want to upgrade your Google Workspace for Education edition.
| Document Version | Date | Description of Change |
| 1.0 | 2/23/2024 | Removed tags with underlines, selected propter tags |
| 1.1 | 3/18/2024 | Updated assessment and comparison versions away form AIT legacy site to CDW assessment |