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.

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.