APE (Automated Plagiarism Examiner) is our in-house anti-plagiarism system, providing three levels of protection.
We think APE is one of the main reasons why we're still the only custom essay site that's never had a case of plagiarism. Since APE was launched in 2007, the system has scanned over 5,000 essays and dissertations, and has proven time and again to be an invaluable tool for our quality control team.
This page tells you about APE, how it works, how it was designed and created, what it looks like and what its future holds. But we're not giving too much away, because APE is ours - we spent a lot of money and time developing APE, and we guard it carefully because our competitors would love to get their hands on it.
How Does APE Work?
APE offers a unique three-stage protection system.
#1 - APE checks every essay against a vast database containing more than 20,000,000 texts, including books, journals and online sources. APE also runs random sections of the work through Google.
#2 - APE uses complex, carefully guarded algorithms to monitor essays for 'seams', which are sections where the writing seems to change in an unusual fashion. This would be a prime indicator of possible plagiarism, and APE flags up anything that seems suspicious. A member of our quality control team then investigates further.
#3 - APE has full access to the main online anti-plagiarism systems, including Turnitin, and is able to pass the work through those sites in order to confirm that all our essays and dissertations are original. APE uses the 'No Fingerprint' option, which means that the work is not stored in any database or system.
Guarding APE
We look after APE very carefully. Having spent two years, and thousands of pounds, developing such a complex system, we don't like the idea of other sites trying to sneak in and steal our secrets.
If any other site claims to have access to APE, they're lying. We don't sell its services to anyone else, and we never will.
Other sites may try to come up with something to match APE, but no-one's come close so far. And by the time they do, we'll hopefully be ready to roll out APE 2.0, which is already being tested and looks set to take anti-plagiarism detection software systems to a whole new level.
A Look Inside APE
This first screenshot shows the main APE user interface panel. This is the first screen that our team see when they open the program, and in this image an essay is being loaded into APE's testing bay:
This second screenshot shows APE's initial diagnostic screen. This is the first screen that's shown after APE has finished checking an essay, which can take up to 5 minutes depending on the word count. Our staff proceed from this screen to various detailed options:
The History of APE
When we started, we used the same anti-plagiarism methods as other essay sites. In other words, we read through all the work, ran it through fingerprint-less scanners and used our common sense to determine whether what we were reading was original. Because we were extremely thorough, we never let a case of plagiarism through, but this attention to detail was costing us huge amounts of time - each essay had to be read and checked by three separate people, and could take up to 2 days to go through all our checks and balances. Convinced there must be a better option, we started investigating the possibilities...
In 2005, 24houressay.co.uk's co-founder James Lavoy was talking to an old friend who was working as a software engineer. The subject of plagiarism detection came up and this friend, Kieran Passanger, suggested it shouldn't be too hard to come up with a computer program that could incorporate any available text database, as well as the standard internet resources and all in-house documentation, in order to provide strong anti-plagiarism detection.
So far so good, but Kieran's next suggestion was more interesting. He claimed that it would be possible to come up with an algorithm that would detect passages that were more likely to incorporate plagiarism. Without giving too much away, this algorithm is based on the fair assumption that plagiarism exists in clumps and is therefore unequally dispersed through the essay. As a result, it's possible to find the places where the text switches from non-plagiarised to plagiarised, or switches between different sources.
Put it another way: a piece of plagiarism would be added to an essay like a patch sewn onto a coat. APE's key ingredient is the ability to mathematically detect the lines where that patch is sewn on, and to raise the possibility of plagiarism even when it's unable to definitively locate the source.
It took two years to develop and road-test APE, and a lot of money was poured into Kieran's efforts. Finally, however, APE passed a series of thorough tests and was introduced to the 24houressay.co.uk office in March 2007.
APE has been part of 24houressay.co.uk for two years, and has proved invaluable. We've maintained our spotless record and are still the only site never to have had a case of plagiarism in any of our work. In fact, we're so confident when it comes to APE that we now have a £2,500 No Plagiarism guarantee, which means that if you find even a hint of plagiarism in any of our work, we'll give you £2,500.
Of course APE hasn't replaced the human aspect of our anti-plagiarism protection, and our quality control team still assiduously check each and every piece of work by hand.
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