SafeAssign
What is SafeAssign?
SafeAssign is a plagiarism prevention service that allows you to protect the originality of work and ensure a fair playing ground for all of your students. SafeAssign is integrated with the Blackboard Learning System™, and prevents plagiarism by detecting unoriginal content in student papers within your existing teaching and learning environment. SafeAssign can also further deter plagiarism by creating opportunities to educate students on proper attribution and citations while properly leveraging the wealth of information at their disposal.
More details about Safe Assign are available on this Datasheet and also at the SafeAssign website.
How Does SafeAssign Work?
SafeAssign can be used in two ways.
Instructors can set up SafeAssignments in their Blackboard courses and let students submit papers to these assignments, in a way very similar to the one provided currently by the Blackboard Learning System.
As students submit papers, they are checked against SafeAssign's comprehensive database of source material. The papers will then be delivered to instructors through the Blackboard Learning System together with the originality reports, which includes the results of the matching process, attached to them.
The instructor has the option of allowing students to submit drafts. The default for this option is No. However, instructors can change this to Yes, allowing students to validate their paper without submitting it to the institutional database.
The instructor also has the option of allowing students to view the results. The default for this option is Yes. However, instructors can change this to No to stop students seeing the results. Click here for more details.
or
Instructors may upload papers directly with the Direct Submit feature, without student involvement. Direct Submit allows Instructors to submit papers one at a time or several at once by including them in a .ZIP file. They are checked against SafeAssign's comprehensive database of source material and the originality reports, which include the results of the matching process, are delivered to instructors through the Blackboard Learning System. Click here for more details.
The level of student involvement in the process is determined and controlled by the instructor.
SafeAssign checks all submitted papers against the following databases:
- Internet - comprehensive index 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.
Note: Instructors should note that SafeAssign is a shared service, that is external to UCD. If submitted SafeAssign assignments are deleted by instructors/tutors, we do not have the facility to recover those files. It is recommended that you save the files to disk, so as to have a backup in case of loss.
Documentation