Safe Assignment at ASU Ruvi Wijesuriya Gemma Garcia Applied Learning Technologies Institute (alt^I)

The “problem”… Students are submitting poorly cited work Internet based paper mills Google/Yahoo/MSN search engines Library - electronic repositories Fellow classmates

The goal Help students learn to become better writers Help faculty identify and address instances of poorly or inaccurately cited papers

The solution Ownership and security of the submitted papers. The papers cannot be reused, shared or sold. Depth and currency of materials used for comparisons Ease of use The option for a student to be able to submit a draft of their paper and have it scanned for originality

SafeAssignment SafeAssignment compares each paper against: Billions of documents gathered from the Internet Published works in electronic document databases Newspapers, magazines, term paper mills, electronic books, and online reference sites Papers submitted from our institution to prevent peer-to-peer cheating.

Availability Currently available in –Blackboard –Stand alone version (testing) Spring 2007 –ASURITE/Webauth based web module Mid 2007 –Integrated into the Sakai CMS

Originality Reports Originality Reports are exact copies of student-submitted papers, except that all sections suspected in plagiarism are underlined and color- coded, with each color representing one source of plagiarized text.

Originality Reports (cont.) Every unoriginal sentence is linked to the source from which it was either copied or paraphrased.

Publicity It is primarily a teaching and learning tool Inform the Deans, Chairs, and Instructors about the tool Inform the –Writing Centers –UNI100 and similar courses –Languages and programs that specialize in writing –And…

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