I have had a lot of experience with both SafeAssign and Turnitin. I trust
Turnitin much more than I trust SafeAssign. I haven't found the false positive
that you found in SafeAssign, Paul, but I have found papers that read like
they're plagiarized (you know, bad writing followed by good writing followed by
bad) but SafeAssign didn't find it and I wasn't able to either. Of course, I
don't have as much time to look for suspicious parts of papers. While Turnitin
was really good at finding word changes here and there in a plagiarized text, I
don't think SafeAssign does that at all. I wish we would go back to
Turnitin.*sigh*
Marte
************************************************
Marte Fallshore
Department of Psychology
Central Washington Univ.
400 E University Way
Ellensburg, WA 98926-7575
509/963-3670
509/963-2307 (fax)
No one knows what's next, but everybody does it. ~George Carlin
When I give food to the poor, they call me a saint.
When I ask why the poor have no food, they call me a communist.
~Dom Heider Camara
I teach for free; they pay me to grade. (anon)
************************************************
>>> Paul C Bernhardt <[email protected]> 3/20/2010 9:23 AM >>>
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
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