I want to thank folks for their responses to my question. I was suspecting false negatives might be a problem, too.
If y'all have more to share on plagiarism software in general, I'm happy to hear more. I may want to build some ammunition to take to our IT people. Thanks! Paul On Mar 23, 2010, at 1:22 PM, Marte Fallshore wrote: > > > 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 > > --- > > You are currently subscribed to tips as: [email protected]. > > To unsubscribe click here: > http://fsulist.frostburg.edu/u?id=13441.4e79e96ebb5671bdb50111f18f263003&n=T&l=tips&o=1480 > > (It may be necessary to cut and paste the above URL if the line is broken) > > or send a blank email to > leave-1480-13441.4e79e96ebb5671bdb50111f18f263...@fsulist.frostburg.edu > --- 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=1482 or send a blank email to leave-1482-13090.68da6e6e5325aa33287ff385b70df...@fsulist.frostburg.edu
