“The score doesn’t mean much”

Students’ and staff understandings of text matching software

Abstract

We report on a 2012 study exploring students’ and staff understandings of SafeAssign text matching software. A total of 326 students and 216 staff at a New Zealand university responded to a questionnaire asking about their knowledge of SafeAssign. Although SafeAssign does not identify plagiarism, 90% of students and 70% of staff thought that it did, indicating confusion about the difference between text matching and plagiarism. Moreover, both students and staff assumed that SafeAssign can do more than it does and responses indicated a lack of understanding of the sources with which SafeAssign is able to match text. Furthermore, many students were not aware that SafeAssign was being used in their papers, and some thought its function was simply an assignment submission platform. These results indicate that staff and students need more information about what SafeAssign does in order to make more effective use of the software.

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