Overview

My Drop Box is a website that checks the content of a student’s paper for possible plagiarism.  A report is generated that provides links from text in the student’s paper to Internet Websites,  electronic versions of journals, newspapers, books, etc., and other student papers submitted by Carlow students that contain the same text.

My Drop Box does not differentiate between text enclosed in quotes or text indented to indicate a quote.  It seeks only to match text to another source.  If a student has used quotes and indentations along with citations to the original material, the material will still be flagged in the report.  It is up to each instructor to make a distinction between plagiarized and un-plagiarized material.

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Accessing My Drop Box
The website address is http://mydropbox.com 

The username is your Carlow email address. The password is your Carlow ID Number. After entering the password press Enter or click the double arrow. Caution: do not click on the ? mark.

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Adding Classes

The Instructional Technology Team can create courses for each instructor or the instructor can create his/her courses within My Drop Box. To request a course be created please email instructionaltech@carlow.edu. If you wish to create your own course, please use the following format of Semester Course # Section #. Examples are provided below. This is extremely important to assist us on the administrative side of My Drop Box and in evaluating the overall effectiveness of this product.

Password:
Use the class ID as the password
Ex. 38482

Class Name:
See table above

Academic Year:
Ex. 0506

Academic Semester:
Ex. FA05

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Instructor’s Manual

A copy of the Instructor’s Manual from My Drop Box can be found here.  The remainder of this document will focus on information omitted from the manual. 

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Adding Assignments

Dates — It is extremely important that the date used for assignment expiration be in the format of a four digit year, two digit month, and two digit date.  For example, enter December 30, 2005 as 2005-12-30.  If the date is entered in any other format (such as 12/30/05) it will revert back to 0000-00-00 and students will not be able to submit assignments.

Student Access to MDB Reports — If the instructor does not want students to see individual reports on papers then put a checkmark in “Do not send originality reports to students.”  If this box is left unchecked then students will receive an email when the report is available.  There will be a link in the email to take the student to the report.  Students will not have access to reports for other students.

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Reports

Follow the instructions in the Instructor’s Manual for viewing reports.  It may take up to twenty-four hours for a report to be generated.  A sample of a report is pictured below. 

- The section labeled as A indicates the level of authenticity. 

- Section B provides links to websites containing matched text.  Within the paper itself each occurrence of matched text is highlighted.

- Click on the highlighted text to open a window comparing the student’s text with an original source. 

- Section C is an example of this.  There may be a percentage to the right of the student’s name. This indicates the percentage of text matched to other sources. 

A high percentage DOES NOT indicate plagiarism.  See the second paragraph of these notes.

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