Students might have a harder time "borrowing" their friends' essays starting this fall.
ASU has new software this semester that will check essays for intentional and unintentional plagiarized writing.
"The Internet has been a great tool in learning, but it has also given us a great problem with cheating," said Ruvi Wijesuriya, ASU's director of learning technologies.
"It is hard for professors to check the validity of an assignment."
The program, SafeAssignment, takes students' essays and compares them to essays on the Internet, published electronic databases, newspapers, magazines, electronic books and other papers submitted by ASU students, Wijesuriya said.
SafeAssignment is seen by most professors as a way to teach students how to properly cite their essays, Wijesuriya added. Professors can use the software to catch plagiarism, although it's not ASU's intended purpose for the program.
Students can submit their papers to the program for review before they turn it in to the teacher, by using the "drafts option," which allows a student to see what they have not cited correctly before the professor sees it.
When the paper is done being checked by the software, it is returned to the student with the text color-coded. The colors are used to visually separate the text.
But when a user clicks on the text, the program shows the URL and the original text from which the information was taken, Wijesuriya said.
The program also allows the University to have an "ASU-only database" where ASU student essays are stored. This allows professors to check papers within the school.
This summer, a committee of ASU faculty submitted a request for proposals for a solution that would give the University a way to check essays and get an originality report, according to Wijesuriya.
SafeAssignment and Turnitin.com, a similar program, were the two companies that responded to the bid. SafeAssignment was chosen because it had more features than Turnitin.com, Wijesuriya said.
He said there were many security features in mind when the committee started looking into this software.
"We wanted to make sure the program is accurate, that there is privacy and security and that essays from ASU do not get circulated onto the Web," he said.
Pamela Brooks, an adjunct faculty communications professor at the Polytechnic campus, has been using the software and allows her students to
submit drafts of the essays before turning in the final draft.
Brooks said the program is useful in teaching students how to cite materials instead of professors automatically calling it plagiarism.
ASU bought the program on an annual license. While Wijesuriya did not know the exact amount, he said it was "not that expensive."
Only about 40 professors are using the program because it is not yet highly publicized, Wijesuriya said.
Reach the reporter at: heather.cutler@asu.edu.
