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SafeAssign: The View from the Writing Center

 

As educators, few things are more distressing than confronting a student about plagiarism. An act of plagiarism is by turns infuriating and demoralizing; it leaves us angry at our students and doubtful about our own effectiveness as teachers. While we are right to be frustrated, too often we channel our energies into finding more effective ways to catch and punish those who plagiarize. However, as educators, we should devote our energies, not to catching plagiarism, but to teaching our students how to avoid it: giving them the skills they need to work confidently and successfully with sources, encouraging them toward independent and original thinking, and recasting documentation as part of scholarly conversation and academic genealogy. By concentrating on these things, we approach plagiarism proactively rather than reactively.

 

Unfortunately, though it is marketed as a “plagiarism prevention tool,” SafeAssign’s main goal seems to be plagiarism detection. SafeAssign electronically tracks source origins and generates an "Originality Report" that notes the percentage of outside material contained in a student's paper, as well as the source of the matching material. However, the language and presentation of these reports cultivate an “us v them” culture, preemptively casting students as perpetrators and their instructors as the police. Thus, while SafeAssign can be used as part of a learning process, faculty must be aware of and work against the personality of the tool.

 

Even when used exclusively as a device for detecting plagiarism, SafeAssign is not without its problems. Its databases are not comprehensive, meaning it is not a sure-fire way to uncover instances of plagiarism. The program is not equipped to identify all outside material; identifiable source material is restricted to what is currently available in electronic form in online databases and websites synced with SafeAssign. This leaves out any source material available only in hard-copy, which includes, of course, an entire library of books, journals, and other sorts of print material not available in electronic form. Further, the source comparison report that SafeAssign generates does not examine how or in what context source material is used. The report, for instance, will flag matching text even if the student has included proper attribution, citation, and bibliographic record. So, while SafeAssign detects matching text, it does not and cannot make a judgment about the occurrence of plagiarism.

 

However, while SafeAssign is an imperfect tool for monitoring or preventing plagiarism, it does offer interesting possibilities for learning about research and writing from sources. When used sensitively and with full awareness of its limitations, SafeAssign can support student learning, providing an additional way that we might foster an ethic of academic integrity in our classes and offering useful opportunities for students to practice writing with sources.

 

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Also in this section:

• The View From the Writing Center
• General Guidelines for Using SafeAssign
• Issues Associated with SafeAssign
  • Intellectual Property Rights
  • Comprehensiveness
  • Intellectual Property V Common Phrases