Students at Dalhousie University will no longer be forced to have their assignments analyzed by plagiarism detection software after the school’s Senate agreed to provide its instructors with alternative methods for assessing originality.
From September 1st 2013, students will be allowed to opt out of having their assignments checked by SafeAssign, an originality-checking program developed by Washington-based company Blackboard Inc.
The Dalhousie Student Union (DSU) argued against students having to submit their intellectual property through a third-party software system. The university’s senate made an amendment to the university’s current Policy on Student Submission of Assignments following a Senate vote Nov. 26, 2012, according to the Senate chair of the Teaching and Learning Committee, Alan Pinder.
“Since [the University values] intellectual property very highly, requiring students to do things with their intellectual property [that they] didn’t necessarily agree with, didn’t sit well [with members of the Senate], and [sic] so that ethical issue can be circumvented by giving alternatives, letting the students choose that their document, whatever it might be, be submitted through SafeAssign or providing an alternative to that” Pinder said.
With the new guidelines, instructors who incorporate SafeAssign in their class assessments will have to offer at least two prescribed alternatives for proving the authenticity of a student’s work. These include producing an annotated bibliography, creating several drafts that detail the development of the work, submitting copies of sources or another method of the instructor’s liking.
The adoption of the opt-out method was largely welcomed by the DSU, who have been staunch advocates against the use of plagiarism detection software in the assessment of student work.
“It’s good to have an alternative” Senate representative Aaron Beale told the Dalhousie Gazette.
“I’m generally against the use of the software . . . I think it assumes students are guilty and have to prove their innocence and that’s not the culture we want to be creating at the university.”
This argument was extensively debated by the working group tasked with reviewing the policy, according to Pinder. Several members of the DSU were involved in the group’s discussions prior to the measure being carried in the Senate.
“That’s one of the standard arguments and that was an argument that we talked about in the group debating the policy . . . [But] being checked is not the same as being assumed guilty of something” Pinder argued.
“Anytime there is a regulation, there has to be some mechanism for checking.”
Although several Canadian universities use SafeAssign or other modes of software to help curb incidents of plagiarism by students, Carleton University has no such policy in place, according to student affairs director Ryan Flannagan.
However, because there is no regulation that enforces or bans the use of plagiarism detection software at Carleton, professors are technically not prevented from utilizing them in their respective classes.
In fact, according to a list of suggested technologies for instructors provided by the Educational Development Centre, Carleton professors are encouraged to use TurnItIn, another version of software that can be used to check students’ work against millions of previously submitted essays for signs of plagiarism.
It is not known whether any professor at Carleton actually uses this software, Flannagan said.
TurnItIn was the preferred paper-checker at Dalhousie University before they switched to SafeAssign in 2011 after members of the school’s IT department discovered that student assignments were being stored on TurnItIn’s databases in the United States.
