As a lecturer, I have advised many students to use a free plagiarism checker tool to verify their work is plagiarism free, when they don't have access to a widely-used paid tool like Turnitin. I encountered a questionable issue related to this in a discussion today. My question concern the following scenario:
When students do not have access to Turnitin, they can use any free plagiarism tool. Then they upload a small document (below 1000 word document) or they copy and paste the text and check for plagiarism using any free plagiarism checker. (I do not mention names here, most of the free versions allow only 1000 words.) When students upload their whole document to the university portal (UK universities Canvas or Blackboard), it will automatically check with Turnitin if the portal is supporting Turnitin access for student uploads. In this scenario, will it be shown as plagiarized or not genuine work, since part of the document or the whole document of the student has been uploaded in free tools? (In case the free plagiarism tool has stored the text - I do not know whether the free tools are capable of that or not - this work just like the way Turnitin works with student repository.)
Can the scenario I mentioned above happen?