Software Profile | Testoverview | Summary| Screenshots | Business Promotion | Links
Software Profile
| ID | S10-06 |
| Product | Urkund |
| Company | Prio Infocenter AB Primusgatan 20 Box 34101 S-100 26 Stockholm Sweden |
| Web Site | http://www.urkund.com |
| Software Type | Online, can be integrated into Blackboard and Moodle |
| Costs | not stated |
| Test Date | 2010-08-02 – 2010-08-04 |
Testoverview
| Ranking for all tests: | 2 |
| Ranking for tests 10-40: | 1 |
| Ranking for tests 31-40: | 3 |
| Usability: | 13 |
| Professionalism | 13 |
| Middle Ranking | 6,4 |
| Effectiveness (Grade): | C- |
| Overall Ranking: | 5
partially useful |
Summary
The last system in the partially useful systems is the new version of the Swedish Urkund. It ranked quite high in effectiveness (second place overall, third for the new cases), but the system is quite hard to use. Even though they now have a German version, the translation is quite bad and the system often reverts to English and then Swedish. The system has been redesigned since 2008, rather for the worse. The navigation is confusing, the layout at times catastrophic with texts overlapping fields, the printed reports could be better, the error messages are cryptic, and the link descriptions are unclear.
we sent an email in August 2008 requesting that they be removed. Even worse, an administrator from the University of Frankfurt had tested the system and used one of our test cases. We were informed that one of our test cases belonged to them! They reported that they had discovered that they were unable to remove papers from the database. This was the reason that they decided not to use Urkund, as they do not want the papers of their students stored or made available to other schools.
Company Statement
Even though we are ranked as the most effective system regarding finding plagiarism among the 5 top systems, we do understand that this is still not a sufficient result for this test. We will take immediate actions to find out how to be even more effective. We will allocate developer resources within the next few weeks for this.
URKUND works best with Internet Explorer although it is also possible to use several other web browsers, including Firefox, Chrome and Safari to view and interact with the reports. We know that sometimes, other web browsers than Internet Explorer can behave in an unexpected manner, causing text to overlap fields, etc. Although this does not affect the effectiveness and the result of the plagiarism detection, this will of course be corrected as soon as possible and a proper web browser compatibility test will be made.
Our BETA-version of the report that users can choose to use is still just a BETA-version. Hence, the compatibility with all web browsers is not refined yet and the possibility to use two different report interfaces might be confusing. Since this new version of the report offers more interaction with the report, we did choose to release it for this test. However, the current version of the report is still available to all our customers. The BETA-version of the report will be refined and made available as the default interface during spring 2011.
We do offer all customers a range of settings regarding document exemption. For example, we are able to exclude documents from our archive by default and we are able to make documents invisible and only available within one particular university. These settings are not available to the individual users to tweak, they must be ordered by the university as they affect the whole unit and not only individual users. We regret that the possibility to change these settings weren’t communicated to the test team and to the trial user at the University of Frankfurt.
URKUND has a large support team that takes care of the daily support issues. However, tests of this magnitude are always handled by our marketing group. The request for removal of the 2008 documents was accordingly supposed to be handled by our marketing group. This has nothing to do with the system reliability. We do regret that this was not handled correctly by our marketing group.
According to 89 % of the answers in our yearly user survey, URKUND is “very user friendly” or “user friendly” (69% says “very user friendly” and 20% says “user friendly”). Only 4% says URKUND is “not user friendly” and 7% says “unsure/do not know”. Still, we look very seriously on the results of this test and we will investigate what has happened to correct this.
We will make changes in our translation to proper German using an authorized translation house.
Screenshots
Screenshot 1: List view
Screenshot 2: Report
Screenshot 3: Big need of revision for layout and German
Business Promotion
“URKUND was born from the academic world. A team of teachers developed the idea of a web based service that would help them detect and deter plagiarism and URKUND was born in the fall of 2000. The problem of plagiarism received much attention in the media and more and more began realise the scope of the problem and the need of a tool to support the pedagogical work. URKUND continued to grow and develop over the years and came to be recognised as Sweden’s foremost anti plagiarism service.
Today, URKUND is present in our neighbouring countries and continental Europe as well as the USA, Asia and the Middle East.
URKUND is a natural part of the educational work of the academic world today. Both faculty and students are aware of the immediate and long term benefits of our system.”
Links
official website http://www.urkund.com
