Primrose Road

The Daily Nebraskan reports that UNL now has a policy "on the books" for the use of Safe Assignment, a system in which students submit their papers via Blackboard; the papers are then scanned and assigned a "matching score" based on how much material from the paper appears to be copied directly from other sources. The big issue here has been whether professors are violating students' intellectual property rights, because the papers are saved in Safe Assignment's database and then used for comparison with future submissions. In other words, students are contributing their work, without compensation, to a commercial service (as the DN's article points out).

It's rather interesting that questions of intellectual property are arising here. Some departments now request that instructors not leave boxes of student papers outside their offices (previously, the large box was a great way of collecting and returning papers), out of concern that someone who is not the instructor or the student could read the paper. At the same time concern for students' intellectual property seems to have heightened, we're seeing changes (thanks to the good ol' Internet) in what "intellectual property" means, and these changes seem to have affected new students' understanding of what constitutes plagiarism in the first place.

While students still outright cheat using essay mills and other sources of pre-written papers, there are also those who walk into college without an understanding of when to use quotation marks, and when and why to attribute ideas to someone other than oneself. My freshman comp students, who were born in 1989, have grown up with the info-at-your-fingertips (well, sort of) Internet; when they were born, I was writing book reports and learning how to use Print Shop on an Apple IIGS!