Plagiarism check and reduction in Bangalore

VTU: three paid chances, and two figures

At VTU the university does the check itself, centrally, on licensed software. As per clause 8.3.2 of the 2023 regulations, a scholar gets three submissions in total, and there is a fee for each check. After the third one, the thesis can’t be submitted again. So you can’t keep repeating it like a library check.

In the table you can see that the PhD Manual 2024 and the formats page don’t give the same figure. For every VTU thesis we plan for 10% or below. A thesis under 10% will pass whichever figure the office goes by. Some scholars plan for 25%, the office goes by 10%, and they end up paying for a resubmission. This is one of the common mistake we see with VTU scholars.

Two more VTU points. The synopsis also needs its own plagiarism report under clause 8.1.3, and you get that report from your research centre. Take the research centre check as a practice round before the VTU check, and act on each match it shows. The second thing is in the 2026 checklist. VTU starts its check only when the full thesis is online and VTU has the printed copy in hand. Keep some extra days for this.

Bangalore University: the library check and the committee hearing

Bangalore University gets the check done through its library. As per the university’s plagiarism policy, you hand over a soft copy to the librarian before final submission. The librarian send the report to you and also to your head of department. If the report shows plagiarism, the HOD calls a meeting of the Departmental Academic Integrity Committee. The committee must hear you before it gives any recommendation.

The policy also lists what the committee should keep out of the similarity report. Quotations with attribution or permission are taken out. The references, bibliography, contents page, preface and acknowledgements are also taken out, and so are common terms, laws, standard symbols and standard equations. Many scholars miss one more item in that list. The names of the university and the departments are also excluded. Your declaration and certificate pages carry the university name again and again, so this item saves you some percentage there.

Be careful with your own published papers. Your supervisor’s Self Plagiarism Exclusion Certificate lists the articles that came from your thesis work. Only those articles are excluded. Any other paper of yours, or of your supervisor, still counts. If a paper had co-authors, you need a consent letter from them and permission from the publisher before using it in the thesis. Ask for these letters in the same week the paper gets accepted, when everybody still remembers it.

RGUHS: 15% with no exclusions listed

The RGUHS limit surprises many scholars. In the Revised Ordinance 2021, clause 11.3 puts it as not more than 15% of the total contents, and we could not find any list of exclusions anywhere in that ordinance. So if your software counts the reference list, standard drug names and the ethics declaration, all of that may go into your score.

From 12 January 2026, an RGUHS circular has given DrillBit access to PG students and faculty through the HELINET Consortium. Each college names one person to handle it. Before you rewrite anything, ask to that person which DrillBit settings your college is using. Also check whether references and quotes are left out of the report.

IISc: you run the check and sign for it

At IISc the responsibility is on the scholar. The Student Information Handbook says the scholar runs the plagiarism check on web software and signs the originality certificate personally. As per that handbook, if some text was generated by an AI tool, that also comes under plagiarism. Suppose you put a matched paragraph into a chatbot and take back the rewritten one, you have only made a new problem for yourself. You can take AI help for grammar and clarity, the handbook permits that much. For any other use you need your supervisor’s approval, and you have to disclose it.

How it works from Bangalore

Send us the complete report in PDF form, along with the Word file of the thesis. A screenshot of the score alone is not enough. Tell us your university and how many checks are left. With VTU scholars we fix our whole plan around how many chances are balance.

We go through each match in the report and mark what type it is. Some matches are only missing quotation marks, or a citation that got dropped. Some come from your own published paper, and some are standard wording. The rest need proper rewriting. You get the list page by page. After that we do the rewriting together on calls, in your own words, and every source gets cited properly. Once the thesis is ready you go back to your library or research centre and take a fresh report from them.

Paraphrasing tools we are not using at all, and swapping characters or hiding text from the checker is also something we never do. Checkers do catch these tricks, and then your high score becomes a question about your honesty.