SafeAssignment™ Now Available Campus-wide: New Tool Helps Students Write and Cite

by Laurie Trufant

As the Internet offers students a constantly growing body of information, it becomes increasingly difficult for them to evaluate and correctly cite sources, and to discriminate between what constitutes plagiarism and what constitutes properly attributed, fair use of someone else’s ideas.

In spring 2006, CIS Academic Technology (AT), working with the Student Affairs Subcommittee of the Faculty Senate, introduced SafeAssignment™, software designed to help both faculty and students deal with some of the issues of authorship and attribution raised by Web access to an overwhelming body of research material. Eighteen participants representing a wide range of disciplines tested and evaluated the software, and recommended it for a one-year trial license. This fall, all UNH faculty will have access to the SafeAssignment™ plagiarism prevention tool through the Blackboard control panel in all Blackboard courses.

SafeAssignment™ is an advanced plagiarism prevention system that allows faculty to create assignments in Blackboard that compare student work against billions of Web-based documents, including all publicly accessible Internet documents up to 2 mb in size, a library of continuously archived Internet pages, term paper mills and download sites, and online databases including ProQuest and Periodical Abstracts, Project Guttenberg, and virtually all newspapers with online outlets. The software then creates detailed matching reports (called Originality Reports) that rate the papers based on the amount of material drawn from other sources and gives faculty links to the original source material. These reports can be accessed by both faculty and students, depending on how the assignment is configured, making the software a valuable tool for helping students write and cite correctly.

SafeAssignment™ also helps faculty make judgments about their students’ work. The software never “grades” a student, and it never makes assumptions about whether a source is properly cited. It just points faculty to sources that may merit further investigation. It can also be used by faculty to check their own research for inadvertent use of scholarly sources.

With the help of the University General Counsel, AT has constructed a disclaimer that addresses the important legal and ethical implications of plagiarism prevention. This document will be made available to all faculty, with the recommendation that they distribute it to all students in courses using the software. Explicit warnings will also be issued to students not to include any personal information (like student name, social security number, phone number etc.) on the papers they submit to the tool. Since students will log into Blackboard with their usernames and passwords to access the tool, SafeAssignment™ will be able to identify them without any personal information appearing in the electronic papers they “hand in.”

While some students in the pilot group were uncomfortable with the idea that faculty could check their work, others acknowledged the value of SafeAssignment™’s Originality Reports as a self-study tool. Pilot faculty were generally positive about the tool: 100 percent of pilot survey respondents found it useful or very useful, while 97 percent felt it had a very positive or positive impact on their students’ work. “I was amazed at how accurate the results were,” one pilot member reported. “This was a great product,” said another. “I particularly liked the originality reports and the Web sources that were identified.”

Although SafeAssignment™ will be available to all UNH faculty this fall, use of the tool is entirely optional. Faculty may choose to use it in a number of ways: as a required part of an assignment, as a way to spot check papers, or as a self-assessment tool for students. Or they may choose not to use it at all.

The Instructional Development Center has scheduled demonstrations of SafeAssignment™ for interested faculty on September 12th from 1:00 to 2:00 and on September 20th from 9:00 to 10:00. Both will be held in Dimond Library, Room 521. Beginning in October, these sessions will be repeated once a month. You can find information on the training, and register online, at http://www.unh.edu/blackboard/training.html. For more information about SafeAssignment™, contact Laurie Trufant at 2-4394, or by E-Mail at L.Trufant@unh.edu.

-Published in September 2006