In Canvas at SLCC, instructors have the ability to check uploaded assignment submissions in Canvas using Copyleaks.

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What is Copyleaks?


Copyleaks identifies potential plagiarism across nearly every language, detects AI-generated content, and confirms authenticity and ownership. The Copyleaks Plagiarism Detector is built into Canvas and integrates within Assignments in the assignment settings.

Important Note: AI detection tools frequently generate false positives, especially when the submission being scanned is less than 400 characters in length. There are other factors that can increase the chance of a false positive such as formatting issues, repetitive inclusion of the prompt questions, pasting multiple student submissions into the same document, etc.

Writing assistance tools such as Grammarly will also cause CopyLeaks to flag AI.

Because of this, and other issues, these types of tools are not meant to be the sole factor in determining academic dishonesty. They are built to flag content that could possibly be written by AI, and are intended to be reviewed by an instructor who can further look at other factors before making a decision. We recommend that you use your own judgement and intuition when reviewing the plagiarism or AI detection results, and consider it more as the start of a conversation rather than definitive proof that a student has cheated.

Creating & Viewing Assignments

For a walkthrough of how to create assignments in Canvas, visit the following:

Visit our page here to learn more about interpreting the Similarity Report


Important Information

  1. As Canvas may not immediately notify Copyleaks that the student submission has been created, we suggest waiting up to 90 seconds before clicking on the resubmit button. This will allow Canvas to notify us that the assignment has been created.
  2. If a student uploads multiple versions of a document to the same assignment, we will NOT compare to their previous submissions. For example, if a student uploads Version 1, Version 2, and Version 3 of a document, we will NOT scan Version 3 against Version 1 and Version 2. However, if the student has uploaded this document to a different assignment, it will be compared. For example, if the assignment is uploaded to English 101 and History 101, we will compare the two against one another.
  3. When enabling Submission Type, the Text Entry option will only scan the first attempt. If multiple attempts desired, we do not recommend enabling Text Entry.
  4. When Duplicating / Importing / Copying an assignment, the assignment Copyleaks configuration settings will NOT be copied into the new assignment.

See also:

For additional questions, contact eLearning at:


-KH 08/09/23