Professors and graduate students squared off yesterday in a University Senate meeting over the use of SafeAssign, a software available through Blackboard that automatically detects plagiarism in papers submitted by students.
Graduate students support the software, which they say would lighten their workloads as teaching assistants. But professors said SafeAssign could produce false positives and give the impression that students are automatically accused of cheating.
SafeAssign was proposed by Graduate Student Government President Laura Moore in January. Since then, Moore has been meeting with university officials to promote the program, which scans web pages to find matching content in students’ papers.
In July, Moore said she met with teaching assistants and representatives from the Office of Information Technology to discuss the software. All parties agreed the software should be used, Moore said, because it could save work for graduate TAs who can spend up to half their time checking papers for plagiarism. Moore added she has heard “only positive things” from the TAs she has discussed the software with.
“It would improve academic integrity by making it much harder to get away with plagiarizing,” she said.
Any student who has a paper “flagged” by SafeAssign would go through the same process students caught plagiarizing do now, which includes being referred to the Honor Council, Moore said. But the program would also allow students to check their work for unintentional plagiarism before handing it in.
“It can provide transparency because students can look and see how plagiarism could be detected,” Moore said.
However, professors argue there are drawbacks to the software because students whose papers receive false positives could be unfairly penalized, said English professor Sandy Mack, who argued against the use of SafeAssign at the Senate meeting.
“I’ve watched other systems catch innocent students many times,” he said. “Quick fixes always have some benefits, but they always have more problems.”
Mack recalled an incident 15 years ago when a student once thanked him for catching plagiarism in his work. Instead of penalizing students, professors should spend more time teaching students why they should not plagiarize, Mack added.
“Our job is to educate students, not to set up a system that treats everybody as an assumed cheater,” he said. “We should treat students as if we assume they are honest.”
Student Government Association President Andrew Friedson also said he is concerned about the “presumption of guilt” implied if TAs are required to use the program.
“If a professor has a suspicion, they should look into it,” he said. “But we don’t want to send the message that we expect students to cheat, and we shouldn’t be fostering an expectation of a behavior that violates university policy.”
Moore said she is looking forward to a campus-wide discussion of the program, explaining that more conversation about plagiarism could promote more trust between students and teachers.
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