Safe Assign and Turnitin: A Comparison of Two Plagiarism-Prevention Services

by Susan Campbell, Learning Support Services, DoIT

Note: Beginning in the next academic year, SafeAssign will be the only online plagiarism-detection tool Mason supports.

While some plagiarism may be deliberate, often it is unintentional and occurs for many reasons, including students’ forgetting to keep track of sources; not understanding the distinction between quoting, paraphrasing and expressing original ideas; lack of clarity about how to cite sources; cultural differences between our country and others or between generations about what constitutes plagiarism; and so on.

Pinpointing where papers might require citations provides useful feedback to students. Plagiarism-prevention services, designed to do this automatically, support a multi-faceted approach to teaching students about plagiarism. Turnitin and SafeAssign, currently available for use by faculty, students and staff at Mason, provide this service.

While many faculty are already familiar with Turnitin, SafeAssign is a newly available tool that is currently integrated with the university’s existing Blackboard subscription. This means that SafeAssign is accessible to faculty even in existing Blackboard courses.

Access. While Turnitin requires a student to create a profile before obtaining an account, students access SafeAssign by logging in to Blackboard using their Mason email user names and passwords. To access SafeAssign, instructors must log in to Blackboard, open a course folder and under the Build tab add either the content link “SafeAssign” to allow students to submit papers or “DirectSubmit” to submit the papers themselves. Instructors may obtain a Turnitin account by sending a request from a Mason email account to Susan Campbell (scampbel@ gmu.edu), the campus Turnitin Administer.

Originality Reports. Both Turnitin and SafeAssign services allow instructors or students (at the instructor’s discretion) to submit papers electronically for specific assignments. Instructors may opt to submit all final papers themselves or check them on a case-by-case basis. Originality reports, generated after comparing papers with Web content, archived student papers and database sources, show possible plagiarism occurrences. The reports do not eliminate the need for instructors to review matches to verify attribution errors because matches occur with quoted material and information considered common knowledge.

File Formats. Turnitin accepts files from students in the .doc (Word 97-2003), .docx (Word 2007), .html, .txt, .rtf, .pdf or .eps format while SafeAssign accepts files in the .doc, .docx (added with 9/27/2008 software update), .html, .txt or .pdf format.

Archives. Student paper archives for both Turnitin and SafeAssign contain data on papers submitted previously by users of these services. Both services offer a way to exclude student papers from their student paper archives. Turnitin provides assignment settings that instructors may change to keep student papers out of the database available to all other Turnitin users. SafeAssign lets students opt out of adding their papers to the SafeAssign Global Database at the time of submission. In this case, the student papers are added only to an institutional database.