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SafeAssign: Comprehensiveness

 

Issue: Though SafeAssign checks submitted papers against a wide range of electronic resources, its databases are by no means comprehensive. Any sources that are available only in hard copy are excluded, and not all electronic sources are included in its searchable material.

 

Potential Benefits: Because SafeAssign automatically collects student submissions in an institutional database, its comprehensiveness is designed to grow as it is used. Thus, as more student work is submitted to the database and as more resources move into electronic formats, the database will grow increasingly comprehensive.

 

Potential Problems: The lack of comprehensiveness presents a limitation to SafeAssign as a tool for both policing and preventing plagiarism. Faculty who already work to identify student plagiarism will likely appreciate the SafeAssign’s possibilities for streamlining that process; due to its lack of comprehensiveness, however, instructors should not rely exclusively on SafeAssign either to catch potential plagiarism or to provide a clean bill of health for a paper. Unfortunately, this limitation also hinders SafeAssign’s potential as a learning tool, since students may not be able to rely on it to accurately report the ratios of source material to their own thoughts or to help them avoid instances of what we might call “good faith plagiarism,” such as inadvertently forgotten attributions.

 

Discussion:

Though there is no way to resolve the issue, the fact that SafeAssign’s database is exclusively comprised of electronic sources is the most significant limitation to its usefulness as a tool for catching plagiarism. It is unable to identify any material from books, journals, magazines, or newspapers exclusively produced in hard-copy – unless that material has been quoted electronically or in papers already submitted to SafeAssign. Thus, SafeAssign is unable to catch a very wide variety of source material, though reports do suggest that most student plagiarism comes from electronic sources, whether in the form of purchased papers, quotations copied from websites or attributed incorrectly or not at all.

 

In some ways, the comprehensiveness issue underscores the difference between what we might see as “good faith” and “bad faith” plagiarism. SafeAssign does not deal well with the more inadvertent and unintentional instances of good faith plagiarism (i.e. noting a quotation but not listing a source, poorly paraphrasing a quotation, listing common facts or sayings without naming the source); it may not catch every instance of this type, or it may incorrectly class these instances with more intentional and serious examples of plagiarism. It does, however, address bad faith plagiarism more effectively, particularly in such extreme cases as buying papers online or duplicating papers from section to section or year to year.

 

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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