safe assign reviews

SafeAssign Review

April 29, 2019 Magdalene Blackboard , Ed Tech , Instructional Design , TILT Resources 0

SafeAssign is a plagiarism detection tool that is built into our Blackboard LMS. When you have students submit their assignments through Blackboard you can choose to have those assignments checked for plagiarism using SafeAssign (click here for a tutorial video). SafeAssign uses a text-matching algorithm to detect exact and inexact matches between a submitted essay and any source material used. Results are further examined by weighing them against both the weight returned by the service and “comparative weighting by the SafeAssign algorithm” ( Blackboard: SafeAssign ). Student submissions are compared against several sources such as:

• Institutional document archives
• The Global Reference Database
• The Internet

This means that SafeAssign not only searches the internet for matches, but also any document that was ever submitted through SafeAssign by users at FHSU and any institution that uses Blackboard. This can be problematic for a couple reasons. For instance, if a professor assigns a research paper and gives every student the same topic, students are bound to find the same sources and use them in their paper. SafeAssign will flag these pieces of every student’s paper as plagiarized because SafeAssign found it within other papers submitted. The professor might then have to manually go back through each paper and check the SafeAssign report for “errors”.  

Just like any tool, SafeAssign has its limitations. It might not catch every bit of copied source material due to the limit of resources SafeAssign can sort through, or it might catch too much and result in an unnecessarily high plagiarism score. This is seen across the board in other plagiarism detection tools, as well, such as Turnitin. In a comparison of Turnitin and SafeAssign (original article and follow-up article ), Turnitin performed nearly the same as SafeAssign in detecting (and not detecting) plagiarism. Because of this, we recommend that you screen the results of SafeAssign and the original material if you are uncertain. If you believe a part of the paper was plagiarized and SafeAssign didn’t catch it, try copying and pasting that piece into Google and see what comes up. Similarly, you could do this if SafeAssign flagged something in the paper incorrectly. It’s always good to double check anything done by a computer system because they can still make mistakes.

If you have any questions regarding SafeAssign, please contact TILT at [email protected] .

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SafeAssign flagging references causing high originality score. Are the actual full reports reviewed?

I have recently returned to school to obtain my MBA. My school uses SafeAssign in blackboard to check for plagiarism. I recently received an originality score on a paper of 34% and the professor wrote a comment to watch out for high scores. When I pulled up the full report there were a total of eight flags. Four of the flags were from my APA formatted references. (If you format them correctly, anyone who uses that source is going to have the same thing). One flag was actually for the name of the school that we're required to put on the title page! The other three flags were for content inside the paper, but were for long names or phrases (example: The U.S Department of Education). There was nothing that was actual plagiarism. Do professors actually look at the report itself or do they just take the score number at face value? I still received an A on the paper, but the professor's comment bothers me. I put a lot of work into my studies and feel that the system is unfairly flagging me with no oversight. Any insight is appreciated.

I can't speak for every professor, but when I was a teaching assistant for a writing course it was standard practice to review Turn-it-in reports for every paper with a score above some threshold (10 or 15%). Quotes and references are often flagged, and professors know this. Ironically the software often assigned the highest scores to my best students, the ones who used appropriate quotes to support their arguments, and missed the really obvious plagiarism cases entirely. So... Don't sweat this too much, OP.

Thank you. It's been awhile since I've had to do any of this. I remember Turn-it-in from undergrad and it had a wide variety of filtering capabilities so you could actually remove references from the score. Safeassign doesn't have any of that functionality. I'll try not to let it worry me too much.

Since the note was pretty friend in nature and you still got an A, I would read this as your professor didn't think the score was high enough to actually be concerning and therefore didn't look into the specifics. And one would hope that some pre-determined higher score would trigger a more careful review (because it'd be dumb and a waste of time to report a high score if the underlying report found nothing actually of concern).

Take this with a grain of salt, because I rarely use SafeAssign (for basically precisely the problem you're describing). But on the occasions I have used it, it takes "plagiarism" scores of like 50%-60% before I even begin to investigate what's up. (I've noted elsewhere the irony that sometimes the worst papers actually have the highest "originality" scores, just because some students' illiteracy is impossible to reproduce).

Thank you. I haven't had any scores nearly that high. I'm glad to see that the reports are reviewed though before any action is taken.

I just got the highest safe assign score I've ever gotten- 60%- but everything it flagged was all cited properly from my textbook. In the past I've gotten 20-30% and never worried.. However, I was feeling nervous because it didn't say those things matched a source... but that they matched "another student's paper" which stresses me out. There are hundreds of us in this same course using the same book and probably the same quotes to answer the questions. Should I be nervous? It is a short paper too, which is why I think the percentages are higher than normal.

The scores are, I believe, generated from an algorithm that incorporates the length of the longest section that closely matches a preexisting passage and the degree to which it matches that passage. So if you have long quotes or lots of proper citations you can get a high score, even when only a fraction of your paper has been flagged. No good professor would use the score alone to mark plagiarism.

What did the professor/teacher say?

I have the same issue from my nursing class, which is writing intensive. I properly cited all my direct quotes in APA format and I only used 3 short direct quotes in my paper. I got a 36% mostly because ALL my APA references at the end were flagged under my references section. WTF. This algorithm is stupid. I worked so hard on this damn paper. My professors have a policy that the match can only be 25% or less. It even flagged the name of my school and the class I'm taking as on the cover page I have to include this info. I'm so mad. I just messaged my professor and they better not give me flack. Students' papers need to be evaluated on a case by case basis, not simply by looking at scores from some crappy algorithm.

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How Accurate is SafeAssign? How to Read SafeAssign Scores

How accurate is SafeAssign

If you are a student wondering how accurate SafeAssign is in detecting plagiarism on your paper, then you are not alone. Your concern is valid as very few people know how to correctly read and interpret Blackboard’s Safeassign scores in its scan results.

In this post, we dwell on these two issues in depth. But first, let us learn what SafeAssign really is and how to use it well.

What is SafeAssign in Blackboard?

SafeAssign is a plagiarism detection software and system developed by Blackboard as a solution to help educators detect cheating and copy-pasting by students. It prevents plagiarism by detecting duplicated, similar or unoriginal content in student papers.

More importantly, Blackboard’s SafeAssign also incorporates features that help teach students about plagiarism and the importance of citing borrowed work.

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How accurate is SafeAssign?

SafeAssign is between 92% and 97% accurate in detecting plagiarism, making it effective enough to detect copying. We tested it with 3 papers and their similarity reports had an accuracy level of between 92% and 97% compared to our actual pre-determined plagiarism percentage. Therefore, if you read and interpret SafeAssign scores well, its originality report is effective enough to show your plagiarism levels.

To test for its accuracy, we uploaded three papers.

All these three papers we used were written by our office writer and were 100% original.

This is how each of the papers describes;

The first one was an essay A, the second was a research paper, B, and the third one was a case study report, C. All these were written specifically for the test.

To test the accuracy of SafeAssign, we copy-pasted content from the internet at the following pre-determined percentages.

Armed with our facts, our papers, and our pre-determined plagiarism score, we uploaded the three files on Blackboard’s normal student account. We submitted at different times of the day and different days of the week when the SafeAssign systems were at different usage levels.

The Results

And the results were astoundingly impressive as the system gave us similarity scores for each file that was as close as possible to the actual rates. The following table summarizes the results;

From the table, it is clear that SafeAssign accuracy for the three files was between 92% and 97%, which explains the possible level of detection of plagiarism in a file.

For the essay, SafeAssign was 94.8% accurate, meaning that it detected 94.8% of the total present plagiarism. It did this by detecting that 23.70% of the essay was plagiarized, but the actual was 25% because we pasted it that way to test.

This means that SafeAssign detected that 237 out of 1000 words were copy-pasted, but the actual was 200 words out of the total 1000 words, representing 25% of the paper.

To me, this is fairly accurate for plagiarism detection software, and it shows that SafeAssign is accurate enough.

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How effective is safeassign in detecting plagiarism.

SafeAssign works by scanning all work submitted against four databases which include; a global database, a campus database, an information database, and an all content found online database.

SafeAssign uses a proprietary algorithm to detect matches to help avoid false positives for common phrases and assuring the quality of results.

The software provides links that one can use to compare cases of plagiarism found in a submitted paper. These links include;

• Text , where the instructor can view any paper submitted with student comments
• Grades , where grades can be given by SafeAssign the grade book; Matching, where the instructor can see the percentage of the writer’s work matching other sources
• SA Report , where actual SafeAssign reports can be linked by the instructor.
• File , where the downloading of the original student submitted file can be done.
• Submitted , where the submission dates and time can be seen.

SafeAssign provides an originality report which contains detailed information about matches found in the work submitted and the existing sources. The originality report lists the potential sources in different colors, each color representing a different source.

The campus database is usually accumulated with students’ work making it easy to detect plagiarism from the wide range of work available.

SafeAssign also helps instructors view work that has been flagged and also remove a flag that is viewed as insubstantial.

Can SafeAssign be Wrong?

Ideally, SafeAssign cannot be wrong because it just gives a similarity score for your instructor to interpret. The similarity report is based on the detected similar content between the uploaded file and both its database and the online content. Therefore, Blackboard’s SafeAssign similarity report cannot be wrong because it needs to be interpreted to determine if a file is plagiarised or not.

At the same time, SafeAssign does not guarantee 100% accuracy. The SafeAssign program does not scan the content of papers that are from outside the public domain books and scholarly journals.

Safe assign cannot check anything from any source that has not been submitted using SafeAssign previously. This makes it not able to detect any cases of plagiarism in such texts.

SafeAssign cannot check against sources behind proprietary authentication mechanisms. These are sources that are not available publically. This makes the detection of matching results difficult.

The use of a proprietary algorithm to weigh potential matches in SafeAssign can mean that instructors may consider matches below SafeAssign confidence threshold that can be perceived by the instructor as a false negative.

SafeAssign finds the best matches from any source that is online or its database, and not just any specific source.

SafeAssign can fail to check matches from an instructor’s expected source and therefore can return a different report from what the instructor is expecting.

NOTE: The fact that SafeAssign cannot be wrong should not be confused with having a false positive. To get the difference, we hereby explain the issue of false-positive below;

Can SafeAssign give a false positive?

Yes, SafeAssign can sometimes give a false positive but should not be a cause for alarm if you did not plagiarize. The system can return false positives because it hardly differentiates cited and uncited work. False positives include not flagging plagiarised work and flagging work that is quality and appropriate as plagiarised.

Yes. Just like any other program or algorithm, SafeAssign is prone to giving false positives and false negatives. What this means is that SafeAssign can indicate that your paper has plagiarism while in actuality it does not have.

This is what is referred to as a false positive. It also means that SafeAssign can indicate the absence of plagiarism while in reality there is. This is called a false negative.

Blackboard updates and tips reveal that false negatives and positives are a result of the inherent limitation SafeAssign has to public data for comparison.

What this means is that SafeAssign cannot check works that have not been previously submitted through it. Also, it cannot check primary sources that have not yet been released to the public.

How to Read SafeAssign Scores and Interpret it Report

A SafeAssign score is a score that represents the probability that the submitted paper contains matches existing in other sources. Let us first understand what a SafeAssign score is.

What is a SafeAssign score?

A SafeAssign score is a mark that indicates the probability of a paper that was submitted by a writer containing texts that match existing sources in the SafeAssign database.

This score is only a warning indicator and does not mean that a writer has plagiarized. This is because SafeAssign may list well-cited and paraphrased work as plagiarised work.

Therefore, this makes it very crucial for instructors and concerned writers to review papers submitted to determine whether the matches are properly attributed.

Reviewing the papers helps come up with a more appropriate decision on plagiarism. In fact, reviewing a paper makes you able to use other SafeAssign alternatives to check for plagiarism before submitting your paper to it.

What is a SafeAssign Originality Report

A SafeAssign Originality Report is a report that is produced when a student submits a paper, it is processed by SafeAssign to show the level of original content and plagiarized one.

The report is provided to both the student and the instructor.

This report details the paper’s percentage of plagiarism in terms of the text within the paper that matches the sources from the database and those from the paper.

Since SafeAssign shows all text blocks that match, it is imperative for both students and instructors to carefully go through the report to determine if the block of text has been credited correctly.

How to Interpret different SafeAssign Plagiarism scores

To understand what is a good safeassign score, one needs to know how to read a SafeAssign score and interpret it well.

You will have to know which score is good, which is bad, and which is acceptable.

The originality report provides the percentage of the content in your paper that matches other works.

In order to know this, you need to understand the three threshold levels of the plagiarism scanner. Blackboard’s SafeAssign scores can be low, medium, or high.

1. Low SafeAssign plagiarism score

These are scores below 15 percent. These are papers that contain some quotes and very few common phrases or texts that can be identified in other documents.

Scores below 15% : Such scores indicate that your paper contains a few common phrases, some quotes, or some texts that match other works. Papers with such scores do not require further analysis.

2. Medium SafeAssign Plagiarism level

Scores between 15% and 40% : Such scores indicate that your paper contains extensive material that has been paraphrased or quoted. This may indicate plagiarism.

This is depending on the similarities detected. Let’s explore each of them.

These are scores between 15 percent and 40 percent. Plagiarism is present in these texts because they contain much-quoted material and extensive paraphrased material.

While this level may be acceptable by some universities, it requires further interpretation by the instructors.

Papers with scores between 15 and 40% show that they have significant matching content that could either be copied work or necessary external content.

Therefore, such content attracts the attention of your school or the professor. This is because these papers need to be reviewed to check and determine if the matching text is referenced properly.

3. High SafeAssign plagiarism score

Scores above 40% : In such papers, there is an extremely high probability that the material has been copied from other works. There is extreme usage of paraphrased or quoted text.

These are scores that are over 40%. These represent a high probability that the paper you submitted work copied from a source in the SafeAssign database or available online.

The Unacceptable SafeAssign Plagiarism is the one that lies beyond 40%. It is not acceptable because it shows that a paper contains extensive and excessively content from the matching content. This is the content that you either paraphrased quote. These kinds of papers need to be reviewed for plagiarism.

How to check your SafeAssign Originality Report

You can access the processed SafeAsign report on the grade assessment page. You can access this page from the Grade Center:

• At the GradeCentre, locate the assignment you enabled SafeAssign.
• Select the attempt on the cell’s menu. On the grading assignment page, in the grading bar, a SafeAssign section appears. When the report is ready for view a percentage appears in the grading sidebar. 
• One can then proceed to view the originality report by expanding the SafeAssign link and selecting View Originality Report.

What is a good percentage for SafeAssign?

A good SafeAssign percentage is the one that is below 15. This means that there are few cases of matching text in your submitted work. Such a score is regarded as a good similarity score because it lies within the low plagiarism levels of 0 and 15, showing your work is original.

At this level, the original content of your writing is above 75% of your paper, which indicates a huge chunk of your work.

The remaining percentage is attributed to sources and references that are necessary for giving evidence to back your arguments.

SafeAssign considers well quoted and paraphrased work as matching text and it is, therefore, the responsibility of the writers and the instructors to review the work to solve such cases.

What is a bad SafeAssign score?

A bad Safe assign score is any similarity score of 40 percent and above. This level is regarded as bad because it indicates that the submitted work has a greater percentage of it copied from online sources of already in SafeAssign’s database. It also shows that your original work is low and cannot be explained by references.

The worst similarity level beyond 40% is the one that matches with files or content already in the database.

That level shows a high probability that you copied a lot of content from somewhere, either online or past papers. You can read our guide on how to outsmart SafeAssign and learn ways to avoid such high plagiarism levels.

This work includes too much directly quoted text and excess paraphrased work. Therefore, the instructors for the course should review the paper and the report to check for plagiarism.

What is the acceptable percentage for SafeAssign?

Ideally, there is no single globally acceptable SafeAssign percentage because each university has its own plagiarism policies. However, the widely accepted score is 15% and below. The percentage varies from an institution to another, and there is no universally specified level.

The score range is widely accepted because papers with such plagiarism levels do not require any further analysis because there is no presence of plagiarism.

It should also be noted that the accepted SafeAssign score is the one that lies within the Low plagiarism level according to the university’s plagiarism policies.

What does it mean by SafeAssign percentage?

Every scanned paper has a score for its report. This brings two questions to mind; What does a SafeAssign score of 100 mean? What does that of 0 mean?

A score of 0% is an indicator that the content of your paper is your own, while 100% means that the paper is extremely plagiarized.

SafeAssign percentage presents the extent of similarity probability between the texts on the database and texts on the submitted work.

This means that they have the same meaning. For example, a score of 70 percent means that there is a 70 percent probability of similarity between the submitted and the work on the SafeAssign database.

This also means that there is a 30 percent probability that the submitted and the database work is similar by chance. This is because the existing source content is in the submitted paper, whether appropriately attributed or not.

What a 100% match on SafeAssign score means

A 100 percent match in a text or passage means that the text matches a source on the database 100 percent. There is a high probability that the writer copied and pasted the work directly.

There is no problem when the well-cited statements match is 100 percent. Titles also may have a 100 percent match because other contents on the database may have the same title. This is also not a problem.

Base on our tests on the papers we uploaded and the information from the site’s website, we can conclude that SafeAssign is an accurate plagiarism scanner.

The software produces a good and reliable originality report that shows the score based on the similarity of the uploaded work with the files in its database and online sources.

To effectively understand the report, you have to know how to read and interpret the SafeAssign scores so as to know what level of plagiarism the report shows. This way, you will get the best out of the scanner by Blackboard.

This makes SafeAssign an effective tool to detect and prevent plagiarism in educational institutions, especially colleges and universities or any other institution of higher learning.

Watch a further guide on how to read the scores

Jessica Kasen is experienced in academic writing and academic assistance. She is well versed in academia and has a master’s degree in education. Kasen consults with us in helping students improve their grades. She also oversights the quality of work done by our writers.

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Submit with SafeAssign

SafeAssign is a plagiarism prevention tool that allows your instructor to check the originality of a homework submission. SafeAssign automatically conducts the check by comparing your assignment against a database of other assignment submissions.

Submit an assignment using SafeAssign in Blackboard Learn: Original Course View

Doesn't seem familiar? Jump to the "Ultra" help about submitting an assessment using SafeAssign .

SafeAssign can only process files smaller than 10MB. If your submission is larger than 10MB, SafeAssign won't be able to process it.

If your instructor hasn't allowed multiple attempts, you may submit your assignment only once. Before you select Submit , be sure that you have attached any required files.

• Access the assignment. On the Upload Assignment page, review the instructions, due date, points possible, and download any files provided by your instructor. A message appears to let you know that your submission will be processed by SafeAssign.
• Select Write Submission to expand the area where you can type your submission.

Drag files from your computer to the "hot spot" in the Attach Files area. If your browser allows, you can also drag a folder of files. The files will upload individually. If the browser doesn't allow you to submit your assignment after you upload a folder, select Do not attach in the folder's row to remove it. You can drag the files individually and submit again.

You can use the file name or provide another name for the file.

• Optionally, type Comments about your submission.
• Select Submit .

After you submit an assignment using SafeAssign, a slight delay occurs between the upload and the availability of the Originality Report. Results are normally available within 10-15 minutes.

View SafeAssign submissions

View your submission and the SafeAssign reports associated with it by accessing the assignment after you submit your paper.

This option is available only if allowed by your instructor.

• Return to the assignment you submitted previously.
• Under Assignment Details , select SafeAssign .
• View the overall match percentage that SafeAssign detected. If you have multiple attachments, SafeAssign analyzes each attachment.
• If your instructor allowed multiple attempts, select other attempts to view SafeAssign's analysis for that content.
• To learn more, select View Originality Report for an attempt.

More on the Originality Report

Submit an assignment or test using SafeAssign in Blackboard Learn: Ultra Course View

Doesn't seem familiar? Jump to the "Original" help about submitting an assignment using SafeAssign .

Your instructor is using SafeAssign if you see Originality Report enabled in the Details & Information of your assignment or test.

Assignments and tests using SafeAssign in the Ultra Course View don't require you to take any extra steps when you're ready to submit your work. SafeAssign automatically checks your work, including attachments and text responses, for matches to published materials.

When you open an assignment, you're informed if your submission is set to be graded anonymously.

More on anonymous grading

SafeAssign starts processing your assignment or test as soon as you hit Submit . While the service analyzes your work, Originality Report in progress appears on the panel. SafeAssign creates an Originality Report for each part of your assignment or test, including text questions and attachments.

Your instructor decides whether you can see Originality Reports for your assignment attempt.

You can view the Originality Report before your instructor grades your attempt. Open the Details & Information panel and select View Originality Report . If your instructor allowed multiple attempts, SafeAssign analyzes all of your attempts separately. You can find the Originality Report for each attempt on the Submission panel.

If allowed by your instructor, the Originality Report appears side-by-side with your attempt. The top of the Originality Report displays the overall text matching that SafeAssign detected. Select an entry under Originality Report to view the full report.

More on how to read the Originality Report

Creating a submission means you agree to the terms and conditions listed above the File submissions area. We provide a link to both the Blackboard Terms and Service and Blackboard Privacy Policy . We recommend reading through those two policies before submitting your assignment.

Exclude submissions from the Institutional and Global References Databases

If the check box " Exclude submissions from the Institutional and Global References Databases " is checked, the submission is not stored in the Institutional and Global databases. The submission is stored as a draft in our internal DB for technical purposes. Drafts have the ability to get the Originality report to understand the matching score, however, no other submission can be matched against this draft.

• Submissions A, B and C are the same documents.
• Submission A, included in DBs, is submitted and OR is generated.
• Submission B, excluded from DBs, is submitted and OR is generated, referencing found match in Submission A.
• Submission C, included in DBs, is submitted, and OR is generated, referencing found match in
• Submission A, however, the OR will not see Submission B as a possible matching source.

Learn - student

Need more help with safeassign.

• Contact your institution's support desk
• Watch videos for students
• Find more help

• Teaching and Learning with Blackboard
• Assessment Tools

SafeAssign is a plagiarism prevention tool that detects unoriginal content in students' papers by identifying areas of overlap between submitted assignments and existing works. SafeAssign can also be used to help students identify how to properly attribute sources rather than paraphrase without giving credit to the original source. The SafeAssign feature is effective as both a deterrent and an educational tool.

Note: Delays in SafeAssign occur throughout the semester based on high demand. Please DO NOT have students resubmit papers as this pushes them to the back of the queue. Blackboard currently reports as much as 24-36 hours or more may elapse before report results are returned.

How SafeAssign Works

Enabling safeassign.

• SafeAssign Assessment Reports

Interpreting SafeAssign Scores

The SafeAssign feature is based on a unique text matching algorithm capable of detecting both exact and inexact matches between a submitted paper and a particular source material. Assignments submitted to the SafeAssign database are compared with several different databases, including the following:

• 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's 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-institutional plagiarism

Assignments accept every possible file type as an attachment to a submission. SafeAssign will only process and create Originality Reports for attachments with compatible file types. SafeAssign is only able to support file types that are convertible to plain text including the following file types: .docx; .doc; .pdf; .txt; .odt; .rtf; .html; .htm; and .zip (processing files that match any of these file types within the .zip). However, Learn Assignment's Inline Grading feature only supports the following subset of file types: .pptx; .ppt; .xlsx; .xls; .docx; .doc; and .pdf. SafeAssign will only process and create Originality Reports for attachments that match the above file types. For unsupported file types, the SafeAssign Originality Report will omit a matching score. This information is visible in the right-hand navigation bar of the new Originality Report.

These two lists of compatible file types mean that there are only certain file types that can be displayed in the Inline Grading workflow and processed by SafeAssign. Below is a Venn diagram outlining which file types support both features:

• Original Course View
• Ultra Course View
• Tutorials and Guides

Enabling SafeAssign in Original Course View

Enable the SafeAssign tool during Assignment creation and editing, under the Submission Details section.

Faculty have the option to Exclude Submissions when creating an Assignment. This option will allow faculty to create Assignments that do not include any student submissions in the Institutional or Global Reference Databases, enabling students to "check their work" against SafeAssign sources prior to submitting a final version without subsequently revised drafts being flagged as matching the previous "draft" submissions. Like other options on Assignments, this option will be point-in-time and editable after assignment creation. If the option were changed at a later date, new submissions would honor the new state of the setting.

Enabling SafeAssign in Ultra Course View

Enable SafeAssign in the settings panel while creating an Assignment or a Test.

• Open Assignment Settings or Test Settings in a new or existing assessment.
• Under SafeAssign , select Enable Originality Report .
• When you enable SafeAssign for the assessment, you can also allow students to view the Originality Report. If you allow multiple attempts, an Originality Report is generated for each attempt a student submits.
• Choose whether to exclude submissions from the institutional and Global Reference Databases.
• Close the layer. Your changes are saved!

You can enable the SafeAssign Originality Report at any time, even after students have started their submissions, but submissions are only checked when SafeAssign is enabled. Submissions received before you enable the setting aren't checked with SafeAssign.

SafeAssign Doesn't Generate a Report when Filename Has Special Characters

Please note that assignment submissions with special characters (i.e., #,:,*,space, etc.) are not evaluated by SafeAssign and will not generate a report.

It is recommended that users only include numbers, letters, hyphens, and underscores in their filenames. In cases where student users have already made a submission, change the assignment setting to allow multiple submissions and then ask them to resubmit the document after making the appropriate filename change.

• SafeAssign Originality Reports

After a paper has been processed, an Originality Report will be available that will show the percentage of text in the submitted paper that matches existing sources. It also shows the suspected sources of each section of the submitted paper that returns a match. The faculty can then delete matching sources from the report and process it again. This procedure is useful to ascertain if the paper is a continuation of a previously submitted work by the same student.

Because the SafeAssign feature identifies all matching blocks of text, it is important that the faculty reads the report carefully and determines whether or not the block of text in question is properly attributed.

Click here for more details about the Originality Report

The sentence matching scores represent the percentage probability that two phrases have the same meaning. This number can also be interpreted as the reciprocal to the probability that these two phrases are similar by chance. For example, a score of 90 percent means that there is a 90 percent probability that these two phrases are the same and a 10 percent probability that they are similar by chance and not because the submitted paper includes content from the existing source (whether or not it is appropriately attributed).

The overall score is an indicator of what percentage of the submitted paper matches existing sources. Please note that this score is a warning indicator only and it is the faculty’s responsibility to review the papers carefully to see if the matches are properly attributed.

• Scores below 15 percent: These papers typically include some quotes and few common phrases or blocks of text that match other documents. These papers typically do not require further analysis, as there is no evidence of the possibility of plagiarism in these papers.
• Scores between 15 percent and 40 percent: These papers include extensive quoted or paraphrased material or they may include plagiarism. These papers should be reviewed to determine if the matching content is properly attributed.
• Scores over 40 percent: There is a very high probability that text in this paper was copied from other sources. These papers include quoted or paraphrased text in excess and should be reviewed for plagiarism.

Frequently Asked Questions

SafeAssign can be used in two ways.

• Faculty Members can set up SafeAssignments in their courses on Blackboard and let students submit papers to complete these assignments, in a way very similar to the Assignmnent tool provided by Blackboard Learning System. The papers will then be delivered to Faculty Members through the Blackboard Learning System together with the SafeAssign Originality Reports, which details the results of the matching process.
• Faculty Members may upload papers directly, without student involvement through the Direct Submit feature.

What information does SafeAssign provide in its reports? A SafeAssign Originality Report highlights any blocks of text in submitted documents that match reference sources, and links back to the matching documents on the Internet or in supported content databases. SafeAssign reports also show similarity ratings for each matching sentence and allow Faculty Members to view a line-by-line comparison of potentially unoriginal text from submitted papers and the matching external documents.

If intructors enable student viewing, each student can view the reports for their own submitted papers.

SafeAssign currently checks all submitted papers against the following databases:

• Internet - comprehensive index of billions of documents available for public access on the Internet;
• ProQuest ABI/Inform database with over 1,100 publication titles and about 2.6 million articles from '90s to present time, updated weekly (exclusive access);
• Institutional document archives containing all papers submitted to SafeAssign by users in their respective institutions;
• Global Reference Database containing papers that were volunteered by students from Blackboard client institutions to help prevent cross-institutional plagiarism.

What is the Institutional Database? The Institutional Database is the archive of papers submitted by students in your institution. Each institution's Institutional Database is stored in the central SafeAssign service and kept separate from other institution's databases. Papers are automatically added to this database upon submission and are stored in the central service to be checked against other papers submitted from your institution. The Institutional Database is completely separate from the Global Reference Database which extends across institutions and students must volunteer their papers to.

Can SafeAssign process papers written in languages other than English? SafeAssign can generate originality reports for papers written in all alphabet-based languages with left-to-right writing. The user interface is currently only available in English.

Who owns the intellectual property rights for each submitted paper? Blackboard does not claim any ownership rights on the content submitted to SafeAssign.

How long does it take to generate originality reports? Reports are not generated instantaneously - it usually takes from several seconds to few minutes to receive a report. During peak use (such as the end of the semester), it can sometimes take several hours.

What file formats does SafeAssign support? SafeAssign supports Word (.doc or .docx), plain text (.txt), rich text format (.rtf), .pdf, and .html formats. In addition, supported file types can be compressed to a .zip file for Direct Submit.

What is the file size limit for files submitted to SafeAssign? There is a 10 MB limit on all files submitted to SafeAssign. This applies to individual student uploads to Assignments with SafeAssign enabled as well as .zip files of multiple papers uploaded by faculty using the Direct Submit feature (in which case the .zip file must be under 10 MB). Unfortunately, this limit is set by the SafeAssign servers, which are managed by Blackboard, so it cannot be overridden.

How does the Global Reference Database work? Blackboard's Global Reference Database is a separate database where students voluntarily donate copies of their papers to help prevent plagiarism. It is separated from each institution's internal database, where all papers are stored by each corresponding institution, and students are free to select the option to check their papers without submitting them to the Global Reference Database.

What if a student decides to remove a paper from the Global Reference Database? Students submit their papers to the database voluntarily and agree not to remove papers in the future.

Are students forced to submit papers to the Global Reference Database either by Blackboard or NIU? All papers are submitted to the Global Reference Database voluntarily, and students are free to choose not to submit their papers to this database. Faculty Members can still use the service effectively, even when students choose not to submit their papers to the Global Reference Database.

What is the SafeAssign "Synchronize this Course" option that appears in the "Direct Submit" area? The synchronize function is to deal with breaks in communication or to update a course which is based on a template or has been copied. It is a good idea for the faculty member to click on this when first using SafeAssign and to periodically update it or update if any course level issues arise. It simply synchronizes the papers in the course with the SafeAssign central database, ensuring the correct associations exist between the course and our central database.

Can students directly submit a draft assignment to check without having it deployed as a SafeAssignment via the instructor or having it be tied to the Grade Center in Blackboard? There is the option to make an assignment a draft. In this case, as mentioned above, the paper is not checked into the institutional database.

Why did SafeAssignment scores in the Grade Center get deleted after the students submitted their assignments? Make sure to enter SafeAssignment scores in the Grade Center after the students submit their assignments. Scores assigned prior to SafeAssignment submission are deleted when students submit their assignments. If paper assignments are collected together with a Blackboard SafeAssign feature, make sure to enter student grades after they have submitted their assignments electronically through SafeAssign.

It is possible to download all of the files that the students submitted to a SafeAssignment. This does not include the originality reports. Those must be viewed within Blackboard directly.

To download all of the submitted files:

• From the course with the SafeAssignment, open Course Tools in the Control Panel
• Click SafeAssign
• On the next page, choose SafeAssignments
• Move your mouse cursor over the SafeAssignment you are interested in. When the Action Link appears, click it and choose View Submissions from the menu
• Click the Download All Submissions button at the top of the page

Your browser will download a .zip folder that has all of the submissions. You can open the folder or extract the files to read the individual submissions.

If you get this error and you are logged into Blackboard, it means that the security or privacy settings of your web browser are set to not allow 3rd-party cookies. You will need to change that setting to be able to use SafeAssign.

For Internet Explorer:

• Click Tools
• Click Internet Options
• Click Privacy
• Set the setting to Low

For Firefox:

• Click Options
• Select Accept cookies from site
• Select Accept third-party cookies
• Change Keep until to they expire

For Safari:

• Click Safari
• Click Preferences
• Click Security
• Change Accept cookies to Always

If you or your students receive this error, you will need to re-synchronize your course. To do so:

• Underneath the  Control Panel , expand the  Course Tools menu.
• Click  SafeAssign .
• On the following page, click  SafeAssign Items .
• On the  SafeAssign Items page, click the  Synchronize this course button.
• You may briefly see a message telling you it will take a moment to synchronize. Your student(s) should now be able to access the Assignment.
• How to Use SafeAssign in Assignments Original
• How to Use SafeAssign in Assignments Ultra

Quick Guides

• Using SafeAssign in Assignments
• SafeAssign Originality Report
• Using DirectSubmit Original
• Grading with SafeAssign

See Also...

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• Achievements
• Assignments
• Performance Dashboard
• Progress Tracking
• Retention Center
• Self and Peer Assessment
• Tests and Quizzes

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SafeAssign  is a plagiarism prevention tool that detects unoriginal content in students' papers by identifying areas of overlap between submitted assignments and existing works.  SafeAssign  can also be used to help students identify how to properly attribute sources rather than paraphrase without giving credit to the original source. The  SafeAssign  feature is effective as both a deterrent and an educational tool.

Note :  Delays in SafeAssign occur throughout the semester based on high demand. Please DO NOT have students resubmit papers as this pushes them to the back of the queue. Blackboard currently reports as much as 24-36 hours  or more  may elapse before report results are returned.

Note : SafeAssign is integrated with the Assignment feature. In addition, all compatible submissions (including those that have been checked for plagiarism) can now be graded using the inline grading workflow currently available for Assignments. All SafeAssignments created prior to the upgrade will continue to work when copied to new courses, but they will not have the ability to use the inline grading workflow. Faculty are encouraged to recreate their legacy SafeAssignments using the Assignment integration.

How SafeAssign Works

Enabling safeassign.

• SafeAssign Assessment Reports
• Interpreting SafeAssign Scores 

The  SafeAssign  feature is based on a unique text matching algorithm capable of detecting both exact and inexact matches between a submitted paper and a particular source material. Assignments submitted to the  SafeAssign  database are compared with several different databases, including the following:

• 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's 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-institutional plagiarism

Like other options on Assignments, faculty can enable the SafeAssign service during Assignment creation and editing, under the  Submission Details  section.

Faculty have the option to  Exclude Submissions  when creating an Assignment. This option will allow faculty to create Assignments that do not include any student submissions in the Institutional or Global Reference Databases, enabling students to "check their work" against SafeAssign sources prior to submitting a final version without subsequently revised drafts being flagged as matching the previous "draft" submissions. Like other options on Assignments, this option will be point-in-time and editable after assignment creation. If the option were changed at a later date, new submissions would honor the new state of the setting.

Assignments accept every possible file type as an attachment to a submission. SafeAssign will only process and create Originality Reports for attachments with compatible file types. SafeAssign is only able to support file types that are convertible to plain text including the following file types: .docx; .doc; .pdf; .txt; .odt; .rtf; .html; .htm; and .zip (processing files that match any of these file types within the .zip). However, Learn Assignment's Inline Grading feature only supports the following subset of file types: .pptx; .ppt; .xlsx; .xls; .docx; .doc; and .pdf. SafeAssign will only process and create Originality Reports for attachments that match the above file types. For unsupported file types, the SafeAssign Originality Report will omit a matching score. This information is visible in the right-hand navigation bar of the new Originality Report.

These two lists of compatible file types mean that there are only certain file types that can be displayed in the Inline Grading workflow and processed by SafeAssign. Below is a Venn diagram outlining which file types support both features:

SafeAssign Doesn't Generate a Report when Filename Has Special Characters

Please note that assignment submissions with special characters (i.e., #,:,*,space, etc.) are not evaluated by SafeAssign and will not generate a report.

It is recommended that users only include numbers, letters, hyphens, and underscores in their filenames. In cases where student users have already made a submission, change the assignment setting to allow multiple submissions and then ask them to resubmit the document after making the appropriate filename change.

• SafeAssign Originality Reports

After a paper has been processed, an Originality Report will be available that will show the percentage of text in the submitted paper that matches existing sources. It also shows the suspected sources of each section of the submitted paper that returns a match. The faculty can then delete matching sources from the report and process it again. This procedure is useful to ascertain if the paper is a continuation of a previously submitted work by the same student.

Because the  SafeAssign  feature identifies all matching blocks of text, it is important that the faculty reads the report carefully and determines whether or not the block of text in question is properly attributed.

Click here for more details about the Originality Report

Interpreting SafeAssign Scores

The sentence matching scores represent the percentage probability that two phrases have the same meaning. This number can also be interpreted as the reciprocal to the probability that these two phrases are similar by chance. For example, a score of 90 percent means that there is a 90 percent probability that these two phrases are the same and a 10 percent probability that they are similar by chance and not because the submitted paper includes content from the existing source (whether or not it is appropriately attributed).

The overall score is an indicator of what percentage of the submitted paper matches existing sources. Please note that this score is a warning indicator only and it is the faculty’s responsibility to review the papers carefully to see if the matches are properly attributed.

• Scores below 15 percent : These papers typically include some quotes and few common phrases or blocks of text that match other documents. These papers typically do not require further analysis, as there is no evidence of the possibility of plagiarism in these papers.
• Scores between 15 percent and 40 percent : These papers include extensive quoted or paraphrased material or they may include plagiarism. These papers should be reviewed to determine if the matching content is properly attributed.
• Scores over 40 percent : There is a very high probability that text in this paper was copied from other sources. These papers include quoted or paraphrased text in excess and should be reviewed for plagiarism.

Related Links

 see also...,  tutorials.

• How to Use SafeAssign in Assignments

 Quick Guides

• Using SafeAssign in Assignments
• SafeAssign Originality Report
• Using DirectSubmit
• Grading with SafeAssign
• What information is provided in its reports?
• Can students view reports?
• What databases does SafeAssign check for plagiarism?
• What is the Institutional Database?
• Can SafeAssign process papers written in languages other than English?
• Who owns the intellectual property rights for submitted papers?
• How long does it take to generate originality reports?
• What file formats does SafeAssign support?
• What is the file size limit for files submitted to SafeAssign?
• How does the Global Reference Database work?
• What if a student removes a paper from Global Reference Database?
• Are students forced to submit papers to Global Reference Database?
• Can students submit a draft assignment to check?
• Why did SafeAssignments scores get deleted after submission?
• How can I download all of the SafeAssign submissions at once?
• Why do my students and I get an error message that we are not logged into SafeAssign?

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Center for the Advancement of Teaching Excellence

SafeAssign, Blackboard’s plagiarism prevention tool, compares submitted assignments against a set of academic papers to identify areas of overlap between the submitted assignment and existing works. Use SafeAssign to review assignment submissions for originality. SafeAssign is only available in Blackboard Learn course sites.

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• User icon Access Via Blackboard
• Check icon Get Help

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AVAILABLE TO:   Faculty

FUNDING:   University

Find Answers to Common Questions

• UIC Help Center

Other Resources

• Blackboard and SafeAssign FAQs
• Video: Using SafeAssign in Blackboard

Supported Files

The SafeAssign plagiarism detection service supports the following file formats:

• Microsoft Word documents i.e., files with .doc and .docx file name extensions
• Acrobat documents: .pdf
• HTML files: .htm and .html
• rich-text files: .rtf
• plain-text files: .txt
• open office documents: .odt
• zip files: .zip

Recommended practices

It is highly recommended that students and instructors name documents submitted to SafeAssign using only alphanumeric characters, the period, the underscore, and the hyphen, and one of the aforementioned file types; for example NetID.final.paper.doc or group2.assignment3.report.pdf.

In particular, using space/blank characters, quotation marks, diacritical marks, the pound sign, percent sign, and any other special characters should be avoided when naming documents for SafeAssign and for most any other Web-based/cloud computing application.

Accessibility

SafeAssign offers accessibility features that allows users to easily navigate and read the SafeAssign web interface. The web interface supports screen readers for all available creator and viewer interfaces. The web interface also support keyboard access, allowing you to use the tab key to access all available functions. All sessions fully support adding and displaying captions. For additional information on SafeAssign’s accessibility features, please visit SafeAssign’s Accessibility Conformance Report (WCAG Edition) .

Getting Started

Original view course.

• Go into the Original View course that you want to use SafeAssign in
• Select the assignment, and select Edit
• Scroll down to the Submission Details section, click on the title to open the accordion section
• Under Plagiarism Tools, check the box next to Check submissions for plagiarism using SafeAssign
• Allow students to view the SafeAssign Originality Report for their attempts
• Exclude submissions from the institutional and Global Reference Databases
• Select the Submit button to save the assignment settings.

For visual steps to follow, please download Detect Plagiarism with SafeAssign for your Original View course.

Ultra View Course

• Or go into the Ultra View course that you want to use SafeAssign in
• Select the assignment, open the Assignment Settings (gear icon)
• Scroll down to the Originality Report
• Toggle the Enable SafeAssign button
• Select the Save button twice to save the Originality Report settings and then the assignment settings.

Viewing the SafeAssign Report

In your Original View or Ultra View course, enter the gradebook

• Select the assignment you want to grade
• Once the assignment is open, you will be able to view the Originality Report on the right hand side of the screen.

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