Maastricht University Library Wall

Anti-plagiarism check with Safe Assign

Practice-information
Use of Safe Assign in Blackboard to check for plagiarism
Persons involved: a number of teachers in most of the faculties of Maastricht University make use of the anti plagiarism software that is available via the electronic learing environment, EleUM (Blackboard).

Purpose of the practice
Students tend more and more to make use of internet sources when they have to hand in a paper and to collect their material via cut and paste, often without proper citation. The university is developing a policy on this matter, consisting of awareness, prevention, detection and punishment. Part of the prevention and detection of plagiarism is the submission of documents in the learning environment via Safe Assign.

Educational context: a few examples of use of Safe Assign

• All courses in the Faculty of Art and Social Science (FASoS).
• Bachelor and Master thesis in the Health Science curriculum of the Faculty of Health Medicine and Life Science (FHML).
• Critical Appraisal of a Topic in the 3^rd year medical curriculum, also in FHML.
• Faculty of Psychology and Neuroscience (FPN): all papers are submitted in Blackboard by students and processed in Safe Assign via bulk-upload by a teacher.
• SBE, several courses
• Faculty of Law, several courses

 For the whole university more than 25000 documents per year are checked.

Tools
 Use is made of Safe Assign the tool available in Blackboard.

Investments
No investmenst in money had to be made since Safe Assign is available in Blackboard with no extra cost.

Contactinformation
Name: Antoinette Vesseur
Faculty: University Library
e-mail address: a.vesseur@maastrichtuniversity.nl
telephone number: 043 3885118

 AV, 4-11-2009