Since I was having such miserable results with SafeAssign, I finally posted a question to one of our college's listserves about the status of Turnitin. Within a day, Turnitin was again offered as a content link within Blackboard - yeah! Now we have a choice -- go with Turnitin, which has a wonderful database collection so that my students can check the status of their quotations and paraphrases, or go with SafeAssign, which has a miserable database and fails to come up with any matches. Now, if students could just elect to have their paper matched against other Internet and electronic database sources instead of also having their paper copied into Turnitin's own database, we'd have the whole intellectual property situation solved and more students and teachers could use the product without feeling that rights are being violated. For me, the benefits of Turnitin -- for both teacher and student -- still outweigh the potential intellectual property rights issue; it will be nice to see what finally happens with the lawsuits so we can move on.

Our English department is undergoing Program Review right now, and I'm the chair of this "enjoyable" activity. Anyway, our committee has been going over the program review questions and deciding how to present the material to the rest of the faculty. One of the questions has to do with goals for the next three to five years. I wonder what the department would say if one goal would be to have all on-campus composition classes offered only in computer classrooms. If we believe that computers assist students in the writing process, then are we doing about 50% of our students disservice by not giving them the opportunity to take a writing class in a computer classroom? I'd be interested to know how many colleges in the country ONLY offer writing classes in computer classes now. I'm sure there are faculty who have never taught in the computer classroom who might have cow at the thought of teaching all future classes in such an environment.

Well, after a day or so, the SafeAssign feature of Blackboard suddenly came to life and began providing reports on student papers. The results, however, left something to be desired when compared with Turnitin.com. Here's the main use for me as I see these "plagiarism detection" tools: I simply want students to be able to look at their reports and see any matches that might have been made to the sources that they're using in their papers. If the match is exact, the student needs to make sure that he or she was quoting. If the student was "paraphrasing" that information and it was a match, then some revision is clearly needed with that "paraphrase." Also, if a paper comes up with a ton of matches to different sources, that may also signal to students that they're using way too much info from outside sources in their paper. So, I see SafeAssign as more of a teaching tool like grammar check than something to catch cheaters. But how good is the product when about 75% of the papers in my Comp 1 class came back with 0% matches even though the papers contained quotations and paraphrases from electronic sources? My conclusion: SafeAssign has a very limited database selection in comparison with Turnitin.com.

More Blackboard problems... All the debate and worry about Turnitin.com last year, seems to be moot now that Blackboard has added its own plagiarism detection tool - SafeAssign. Like Turnitin.com SafeAssign compares student papers against a multitude of databases, but unlike Turnitin, SafeAssign doesn't keep student papers for its own database. That means it's not exactly sufficient in terms of catching students copying other student papers at JCCC from semester to semester, but that's a sacrifice people arguing for intellectual property rights seem able to make. I really don't care which one we use, but it would be nice to have at least one working. Turnitin.com is no longer available as an add-on yet in our new version of Blackboard (even though I think we have a 1-year contract), so I moved on to SafeAssign. However, though SafeAssign is happy to take student papers, the program is not yet providing reports for students or faculty.

I really like to use these plagiarism software tools as teaching tools, so I encourage students to check their "originality reports" to see how accurately they're quoting and paraphrasing. Last semester, students in my classes using Turnitin.com found the matches to be of help and many revised their papers based on the number of matches - e.g. students didn't know how much they were "overquoting" until they say all the matches. So, I look forward to doing the same thing with SafeAssign, but rather than providing students and me with a report that looks like this, I instead am just getting another copy of the student paper. Thanks AGAIN Blackboard for promising something without delivery! Way to go Blackboard!