2008 Woodie Awards
Vote Absentee
STAFF EDITORIAL: Safe Assignment needs to be used with care
Issue date: 9/24/07 Section: Opinion
- Page 1 of 2 next >
After more than a year in the making, a policy for the use of the Safe Assignment software is finally on the books, agreed on last month by the Association of Students of the University of Nebraska.
The software allows students and professors to check papers for plagiarism by comparing them with a database of other papers from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, other schools and the Web.
The hard part is finding a balance between a professor's right to look for plagiarism in academic work and students' rights to have their intellectual property used appropriately in the hands of those professors. The current policy does not go far enough in safeguarding students and their work.
After being checked for plagiarism, a paper is uploaded to Safe Assignment's database to be used to check other papers.
Greg Gifford, a graduate student in the College of Engineering and Human Sciences who has been working with ASUN on the project, said one of the major questions is whether a student's work should be contributing to the commercial advances of a company.
"Students intend these papers to be submitted to professors," he said, not to be used to check for plagiarism.
Students can have some impact on the use of their work; if you don't want your paper to be used to advance this company, now owned by Blackboard, you can request that it not be uploaded.
If you don't say anything, however, away it goes into the databases.
Plagiarism is obviously a bad thing that impedes the work of serious students and professors. But we want to make sure students are protected from unfair judgment of their work, and we're worried about the accessibility of this database of papers.
Gifford did say there would be no way to steal a paper from the Safe Assignment database.
When uploading a paper to Safe Assignment, the program will tell a user what percentage is plagiarized and highlight the sections that are. But Gifford said bibliographies and excerpts that are cited correctly can still come up as plagiarized.
The software allows students and professors to check papers for plagiarism by comparing them with a database of other papers from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, other schools and the Web.
The hard part is finding a balance between a professor's right to look for plagiarism in academic work and students' rights to have their intellectual property used appropriately in the hands of those professors. The current policy does not go far enough in safeguarding students and their work.
After being checked for plagiarism, a paper is uploaded to Safe Assignment's database to be used to check other papers.
Greg Gifford, a graduate student in the College of Engineering and Human Sciences who has been working with ASUN on the project, said one of the major questions is whether a student's work should be contributing to the commercial advances of a company.
"Students intend these papers to be submitted to professors," he said, not to be used to check for plagiarism.
Students can have some impact on the use of their work; if you don't want your paper to be used to advance this company, now owned by Blackboard, you can request that it not be uploaded.
If you don't say anything, however, away it goes into the databases.
Plagiarism is obviously a bad thing that impedes the work of serious students and professors. But we want to make sure students are protected from unfair judgment of their work, and we're worried about the accessibility of this database of papers.
Gifford did say there would be no way to steal a paper from the Safe Assignment database.
When uploading a paper to Safe Assignment, the program will tell a user what percentage is plagiarized and highlight the sections that are. But Gifford said bibliographies and excerpts that are cited correctly can still come up as plagiarized.
Be the first to comment on this story