Factors associated with similarity index (SI) scores among a large cohort of undergraduate nursing students

Similarity index (SI) generated by text matching software (TMS) on written assessment tasks is routinely collected by universities and used by academics to flag potential cases of plagiarism in an era of prolific electronic information. (Bertram Gallant, 2008). For students, SI provides feedback on how they have paraphrased the work of others in terms of text matching, thus providing the opportunity to restructure text as required to reduce their SI to avoid plagiarism. Therefore paraphrasing is an important academic writing skill that has been adopted by many universities to improve academic integrity.