According to Sam Houston State University’s Academic Dishonesty statement, “All students are expected to engage in all academic pursuits in a manner that is above reproach. Students are expected to maintain honesty and integrity in the academic experiences both in and out of the classroom.” To help facilitate this endeavor, faculty may employ one or more of the following tools:
Test Protection
Respondus Lockdown Browser
Respondus LockDown Browser® is a custom browser that locks down the testing environment within Blackboard. When students use Respondus LockDown Browser they are unable to print, copy, go to another URL, or access other applications. When an assessment is started, students are locked into it until they submit it for grading. Available for Windows, Mac and iOS. To learn more about this integration, check out the student's Respondus Lockdown Browser page.
Respondus Monitor
Respondus Monitor is a companion application for LockDown Browser® that uses webcam and video technology to prevent cheating during online exams. Respondus Monitor integrates seamlessly with learning management systems like Blackboard, and is ideal for online testing environments. To learn more about this integration, click here.
Plagiarism Detection
Blackboard SafeAssign
SafeAssign compares submitted assignments against a set of academic papers to identify areas of overlap between the submitted assignment and existing works. SafeAssign is based on a unique text matching algorithm capable of detecting exact and inexact matching between a paper and source material. Submissions are compared against several databases:
- Internet: Comprehensive index of documents available for public access on the internet.
- ProQuest ABI/Inform database: More than 1,100 publication titles and about 2.6 million articles from 1990 to present time, updated weekly (exclusive access).
- Institutional document archives: Contains all papers submitted to SafeAssign by users in their respective institutions.
- Global Reference Database: Contains papers that were volunteered by students from Blackboard client institutions to help prevent cross-institution plagiarism.
For more information on this resource, click here.
Turnitin
Turnitin is web-based plagiarism detection software owned by Turnitin.com, Inc., and is available to instructors at Sam Houston State University via a Blackboard Building Block integration. Turnitin can be used as a deterrent, but can also act as an educational tool to teach students how to work with sources and to improve paraphrasing and quoting skills. The repository to which papers are compared for originality currently consists of three primary databases:
- Both a current and an extensively archived copy of the publicly accessible Internet
- Commercial pages from books, newspapers, and journals
- Student papers already submitted to Turnitin