SafeAssign is a plagiarism prevention service, offered by Blackboard. This service helps educators prevent plagiarism by detecting unoriginal content in student papers. In addition to acting as a plagiarism deterrent, it also has features designed to aid in educating students about plagiarism and the importance of proper attribution of any borrowed content.
SafeAssign is a part of the Blackboard Beyond family and is centrally hosted by Blackboard, like the rest of the Beyond products and services. Although it is a new Blackboard service, it is based on a mature and proven technology that Blackboard acquired from Sciworth Inc. (MyDropBox) and enhanced to offer even better stability, performance, and integration with other Blackboard products.
SafeAssign can be used in two ways.
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.
The following training materials are available to SafeAssign end-users:
SafeAssign currently checks all submitted papers against the following databases:
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.
The Release Statement is text included with every SafeAssignment to inform students that their paper will be compared to other sources through SafeAssign. The specific text of your Release Statement is determined by your institution's System Administrator and is Entered during configuration of the SafeAssign Building Block.
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.
Plagiarism prevention is a popular service that helps faculty members address an existing classroom issue in an efficient manner. It has been used effectively to deter plagiarism and educate students about proper citation of sources, and is consistent with Blackboard's mission of using innovation and technology to empower educators.
This product is offered as a Beyond service because, like other Beyond products, it is centrally-hosted by Blackboard and other than the SafeAssign Building Block" or SafeAssign PowerLink", it does not require any additional equipment or software on the client side. It also includes the Global Reference Database, which is a shared resource created by the Blackboard user community to cooperatively prevent plagiarism.
Blackboard does not claim any ownership rights on the content submitted to SafeAssign.
Reports are not generated instantaneously - it usually takes from several seconds to few minutes to receive a report.
SafeAssign supports Word (DOC). plain text (TXT), rich text format (RTF), PDF, and HTML formats. SafeAssign anticipates supporting Office 2007 file format in the future.
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.
No, Blackboard is only authorized to store extra copies of student papers that were volunteered and use them for plagiarism prevention purposes.
Students submit their papers to the database voluntarily and agree not to remove papers in the future.
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.
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.
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.
All answers to FAQs provided by the SafeAssign Wiki: http://wiki.safeassign.com
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Last Updated: 3/26/2008