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!