I'm wondering about others' experiences using SafeAssign, if you'd care to share.
SafeAssign is Blackboard's plagiarism detection system built into Blackboard. I'm using it for the first time this semester. I had used, sparingly, Turnitin in the past. Turnitin seemed to be pretty accurate. That is, when I compared a sentence or phrase if flagged, I was able to find it without difficulty in the supposed source document (mainly because Turnitin flags it in the source document, too). Today I'm reviewing some papers using SafeAssign and I'm finding it flags sentences for reasons that I cannot detect in the supposed source document. For instance, this entire sentence was flagged in a student's paper "Public Self-Consciousness, Private Self-Consciousness and Social Anxiety factors were examined in order to interpret the scales liability. " Ignoring the improper usage of liability, I was fascinated that a source document somehow was out there for the sentence. So, I proceeded to click on the link to that document and this was what I got: http://www.uncg.edu/~p_silvia/tools/scs.htm I searched that short webpage and did not find on the page the following key words: examined, interpret, liability. Nor do I find a sentence that could be judged as essentially similar in meaning. The word factor does appear as well as the factors of the self-consciousness scale. I even examined the webpage source code to see if these words or this sentence appears in the source code so that it isn't displayed. Nope, not in the source code, either. This seems to be a remarkable false positive from SafeAssign. It is not the only one, just the easiest for me to relate to you. I found several other similar apparent false positives today. My confidence in SafeAssign is remarkably reduced. I am also finding some true positives or at least correct findings of material on students' papers that also appear in other sources. Only one of these is a true plagiarism incident (minor). Mostly, it is flagging commonly found phrases, citations and reference entries. What experiences of use of SafeAssign do you have? Do you find similar problems or are there secrets to how it should be set up that I need to pass on to our IT folks? Paul C. Bernhardt Department of Psychology Frostburg State University Frostburg, Maryland --- You are currently subscribed to tips as: [email protected]. To unsubscribe click here: http://fsulist.frostburg.edu/u?id=13090.68da6e6e5325aa33287ff385b70df5d5&n=T&l=tips&o=1400 or send a blank email to leave-1400-13090.68da6e6e5325aa33287ff385b70df...@fsulist.frostburg.edu
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