Success Story
How NSS Used the Copyleaks API To Improve Plagiarism Detection of Contest Essay Submissions
The Challenge:
Scaling Integrity for a Global Space Contest
The National Space Society (NSS) has hosted the annual Gerard K. O’Neill Space Settlement Contest since 1994, attracting thousands of students worldwide. With submissions often reaching up to 200 pages in length, the NSS faced a massive logistical hurdle: every entry had to be reviewed for plagiarism. Historically, this process was performed manually, a grueling task that took judges weeks or even months to complete. As the contest grew, the NSS needed an automated solution that could handle massive amounts of data, provide thorough documentation, and integrate directly with Award Force, their awards management software.
The Solution:
Copyleaks API Integration
In 2018, the NSS implemented the Copyleaks API to revolutionize its judging workflow. By integrating the software directly into the Award Force platform, the NSS established an automated “Suspect Score” for every submission. This allowed judges to instantly filter entries: those with a 0% score passed automatically, while those at 5% or higher were flagged for review. This transition moved the organization away from manual labor toward a data-driven process, supported by a secure, private repository to ensure that new entries were not plagiarizing past winning submissions.
Background
The National Space Society (NSS) is an educational, non-profit organization dedicated to the creation of a spacefaring civilization. Their flagship student competition, the Gerard K. O’Neill Space Settlement Contest, challenges students from kindergarten through 12th grade to design permanent, free-floating space settlements. The contest receives thousands of entries annually from across the globe, primarily in the form of intensive research essays and technical reports.
The Process
The NSS selected Copyleaks primarily for its seamless API capabilities and the depth of its reporting. During implementation, the focus was on establishing a clear, binary system for initial screening. The “Suspect Score” became the first line of defense, while the “Similarity Report” provided the deep-dive analysis needed for contested entries. The Similarity Report allowed judges to view side-by-side comparisons of flagged text and their original sources, making the final decision-making process transparent and objective. Furthermore, the Copyleaks Customer Success Team proved essential, offering 24-hour turnaround times for any technical questions during the high-stakes judging windows.
The Impact
The partnership with Copyleaks transformed the contest’s efficiency overnight. Processing times for plagiarism checks dropped from months to just a matter of days. The impact became even more evident as the volume of submissions grew; in 2023, the NSS used Copyleaks to scan 4,567 submissions, leading to the disqualification of 1,894 entries for plagiarism—a level of oversight that would have been impossible manually. Beyond simple detection, the private repository feature has created a “legacy database,” ensuring the integrity of the contest remains intact year over year by preventing the recycling of past winning work.
The ease of the API integration was one of the reasons we chose Copyleaks. It was seamless. What has made us stay with Copyleaks is customer support. If we have a question, it’s resolved within 24 hours.
Looking Forward
As generative AI tools like ChatGPT became widely available in 2023, the NSS recognized a new threat to the contest’s mission of original student thought. To stay ahead of this trend, the NSS is currently exploring the implementation of the Copyleaks AI Detector as a formal part of the judging process. This expansion will allow the NSS to not only identify traditional plagiarism but also ensure that the complex space settlement concepts submitted by students are the product of human innovation rather than AI generation.