SafeAssign

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.

AVAILABLE TO: Faculty

FUNDING: University

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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).

Original View Course

  1. Go into the Original View course that you want to use SafeAssign in
  2. Select the assignment, and select Edit
  3. Scroll down to the Submission Details section, click on the title to open the accordion section
  4. Under Plagiarism Tools, check the box next to Check submissions for plagiarism using SafeAssign
  5. Enable any advanced settings:
    1. Allow students to view the SafeAssign Originality Report for their attempts
    2. Exclude submissions from the institutional and Global Reference Databases
  6. 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

  1. Or go into the Ultra View course that you want to use SafeAssign in
  2. Select the assignment, open the Assignment Settings (gear icon)
  3. Scroll down to the Originality Report
  4. Toggle the Enable SafeAssign button
  5. Enable any advanced settings:
    1. Allow students to view the SafeAssign Originality Report for their attempts
    2. Exclude submissions from the institutional and Global Reference Databases
  6. 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

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