We have been having some issues with the Safe Assignment tool in myUSF and have had numerous reports of unexpected or flawed behavior of the software. We understand how troubling this performance is and are doing our best to get fixes from the company ASAP. We are somewhat surprised by the behavior, especially given the size of some of Safe Assignment’s customers. Academic Computing is in communication with the company that produced this software and hope to see some improvement in the programs behavior soon.
In the meantime, the company has given us some information as to their design in an effort to minimize the problems that we are seeing.
- Quick Submit is intended for letting instructors quickly
check a few papers in case an instructor wants to check a few suspicious
papers from a course which is not checked by SafeAssignment or a few
students failed to submit papers to SA. So, it is optimized for working
with batches of 10-50 papers. - The Delete
function is created to delete student papers when a student uploads an
incorrect file. Typically, files should never be deleted from the system. The purpose of the Delete function is to delete papers from the institutional database. This function was created to let instructors delete
student papers from the internal search database. Correctly submitted files should NEVER be deleted. Papers are automatically archived when the corresponding Course is over, but they stay
in the institutional database after that. - If you have submitted a paper and you try to view the SA Report on the paper and the page is blank. The paper has not been checked yet (We know that this is a poor design, and we are told that this will be repaired shortly).
Blackboard’s Assignment tool is still functioning properly and can be used in cases where an instructor is not concerned about high possibilities of plagiarism. We are attempting to identify common errors and to rigorously document the conditions in which the errors occured in an effort to communicate to the company specific cases of problems that can be used to solve our issues.
We are aware of the seriousness of these flaws and are doing everything in our power to rectify this situation.
March 3rd, 2006 at 10:59 am
Perhaps we should never have moved away from Turnitin.com.
March 3rd, 2006 at 4:56 pm
This is, of course, a possibility. The decision to move to Safe Assignment was not a simple one, and be assured that we considered both products closely. Unfortunately, the issues that we are seeing now did not arise in the pilot tests.
March 7th, 2006 at 9:48 pm
You get what you pay for.
March 7th, 2006 at 10:12 pm
We thought we were getting a “DEAL” by switching from Turnitin.com to SafeAssignment. Boy were we wrong! Turnitin is more expensive, but it WORKS! We will be switching back in December…
March 8th, 2006 at 1:35 pm
Someone told me MyDropBox (SafeAssignment) is connected with paper mill sites. I’m worried that our papers will show up on these sites for sale to some other student!
March 9th, 2006 at 12:03 pm
The decision to license Safe Assignment was not purely financial, though that would be a significant factor. There have been many accusations made with concern to people who now work for Safe Assignment, though nothing is clear and simple. Many of these accusations come from their largest competitor. The concern about relations to paper mills was with regard to using SA to make paper mills work better, not that SA was selling papers.
As for Turnitin working, it returns better results because Turnitin maintains rights to every paper submitted to the system (without the consent of the student). Many universities (including UC Berkley where Turnitin had its naissance) will not use Turnitin due to the dangerous legal position in which it places the university with regard to facilitating a company to justify high prices through the assumption of rights to papers without the creators consent. The Chronicle had an article on this several years ago and the situation is virtually unchanged ( http://chronicle.com/free/v48/i36/36a03701.htm ). There is a nice guide done by UMUC to thinking through some of these issues ( http://www.umuc.edu/distance/odell/cip/vail/faculty/detection_tools/intro.html ).
It might be possible that there is no good ethical choice regarding plagiarism software that also accomplishes what we need it to do. Perhaps, what we need to do is to re-think whether this market is mature enough to get into at this time, and/or evaluate the universities position with regard to such tools rather than assuming that there are two pieces of software and we should all choose sides over which one is best. This type of either/or thinking limits our ability to make informed decisions about the future.
Doing a web search for “plagiarism detection software” will turn-up an array of diverse perspectives to which we might want to listen.
April 4th, 2006 at 6:36 pm
Wouldn’t it be great if these tools were used to faciliate student learning versus the way that USF currently uses them to uncover suspected plagiarists and cheaters? I do wish that this technology was being used to advance our intelligence. With the stance that USF has taken on the use of SafeAssignment, I am surprised that you have left spell check on all of the campus computers? I do wish that all USF students had access to this technology. Dave Matthews calls it “the space between.” It is that space where someone might actually be honest and learning how to learn versus purposely trying to plagiarize. USF assumes instant guilt and seems to have no policy on the person who inadvertently plagiarizes. Detection software would benefit an honest student very nicely. Wondering why we don’t use it that way?
April 19th, 2006 at 10:36 pm
Coby O’Brien wrote, ,em>USF assumes instant guilt and seems to have no policy on the person who inadvertently plagiarizes. While I agree with him that plagiarism-prevention activities should focus on education (check out the text copy self-checking tool!), USF policy on plagiarism is fairly clear that it is the student’s obligation to avoid plagiarism. Intent doesn’t enter into it, unless students want faculty who are telepathic (or think they are). If I can see clear evidence that what happened was a stupid error in citation mechanics, that’s not a failure on the paper. But plagiarism is plagiarism.
May 31st, 2006 at 10:29 am
When I think of USF, it makes me happy that i have under a year left. Maybe when they learn how to keep blackboard up and running then maybe that plagarism thing could be of some assistance. I’m a MIS major we don’t write papers and if we do the professor would know without using SA. I think students should have access to this software because it is much easier today to plagarize then in the past. All i can say to future students is to be careful. Make sure every idea is put it into your own words.
June 5th, 2006 at 8:16 pm
Coby, please define “inadvertent plagiarism.”
In an online course with 1,000 students, 2% “inadvertently plagiarized” even after they were told in the orientation, in the syllabus, and in an email that they would be failed for doing so. Therefore, I advertently failed them!
There were four students who turned in EXACTLY the same assignment, 100% inadvertently cut-and-pasted from a Website. Yes, it is easy to plagiarize from the Internet. But guess what? It is even easier to find out. (We don’t even have to do a search; SA color codes the source of the real author.)
naa
June 22nd, 2006 at 5:54 pm
I must be behind the times. I know how to cut and paste; but how one would do that inadvertently escapes me. I may be missing some information here; but if you cut and paste something into another document and do not acknowledge the author it seems obvious to me that plagiarism has occurred. “100% inadvertently cut-and-pasted” is a concept that I do not understand. What information am I missing? Please help me to understand.
August 14th, 2006 at 7:23 pm
Good Evening. I am just starting at this university and I am instantly reminded of a statistical warning akin to Jefferson’s warning of the political parties. Jefferson states that political parties will, in time, become tools for voting party lines rather than voting for issues. A ‘professed” statistician once told me that with the advent of computers and tracing tools, like this Safe Assignment, and an accumulation of data over time, that plagiarism will become a more common event. He eluded to the fact that for scores of years English, Math and many other fields are taught in similar manners to a nation of learners that emulate their teachers and educators. If, after many years of accumulation, a computer compares this mass of papers written on the same topic there will be several papers flagged as plagiarized, even if NONE of the papers were ever plagiarized. This ‘professed” statistician said that there are only so many ways of writing a paper on the same subject. He further stated that although there are many different approaches, the guide lines established by the tutors, teachers, and the educational system help guide those students to write in the same manner, conforming to standardized approach methods.
—My only concern is that before a student is penalized for having the computer program flagging their paper as being plagiarized, that the student can meet a board and restate, in similar wording, their topic and meaning. This should not be an instant on-the-spot recant, but rather an appropriately timed trial. I truly agree that a paper that is flagged as 100 percent plagiarized is really a plagiarized paper … however, I would not like to be caught in the very same trap that I just highlighted.
For those students reading this article, please do NOT take this as a quest or gospel, but rather an opportunity to use common sense. Thank you.
March 19th, 2007 at 1:12 pm
> there are only so many ways of writing a paper on the same subject