SafeAssignment
Easily Deter Plagiarism in Your Class Using SafeAssignment for Blackboard

SafeAssignment™ is a revolutionary approach to plagiarism prevention providing educators with the world's leading solution for detecting student plagiarism. Safe Assignment™ offers a break-through technology that matches student papers with every document on the Internet and with a number of electronic document databases to ensure originality of student-submitted documents.

Safe Assignment plug-in is the only plagiarism detection solution available on the market designed specifically for the Blackboard™ Learning System. This helps educators expect most out of their students by detecting all forms of plagiarism and providing 100% proof when a paper has been plagiarized.

SafeAssignment at UIC

Instructors can submit student term papers manually (individual documents or groups of documents in Zip files), or easily set Blackboard Assignments to automatically collect the papers and run them through SafeAssignment's plagiarism detection.

For each document submitted, SafeAssignment produces Originality Reports which provide only the necessary information in a highly intuitive form, so that instructors only need to spend a few seconds to determine if plagiarism has occurred and to identify the sources.

Because SafeAssignment works as an plug-in module to Blackboard, no special accounts or passwords are needed. Faculty members who do not use Blackboard… but are interested in using SafeAssignment should contact the Instructional Technology Lab for special arrangements.

Using SafeAssignment

The process for an instructor to set up an assignment in Blackboard to automatically use SafeAssignment is very simple:

• In the Control Panel, click on Assignments
• On the Assignment "Add" toolbar, select "Safe Assignment" on the "Add Content Type" pull-down menu, all the way on the right of the toolbar, next to the Go button, then press Go
• Fill out the little "Add Safe Assignment" Web form and click the Submit button.

To submit an assignment the student essentially follows the same procedure as for submitting any other Blackboard assignment, namely:

• Click the Assignments button on the main Blackboard navigation bar
• under the appropriate assignment entry, click on the link labelled "View/Complete"
• Fill out the "Upload Safe Assignment" Web form entering an optional short comment and attaching (i.e clicking on the Browse... button to find and upload the desired document file)
• Click the Submit button

The students document will be uploaded to the UIC Blackboard Learning System server and also forwarded to the SafeAssignment server where the document will go through the SafeAssignment plagiarism detection process (which encompasses comparing the submitted document against content publicly available anywhere on the Internet (2.5 billion documents), a variety of free and fee-based electronic repositories, paper mils, electronic magazines and newspaper collections, and so forth, and finally compared against other UIC-only submitted documents.

As a ball-park, figure, the SafeAssignment company suggest if their reports list a plagiarism percentage suspect percentage of 40% or higher, there is a good chance that some plagiarism has been committed.

Within a few hours, SafeAssignment will complete an Originality report (aka SafeAssignment report) for each document submitted, and populate a SafeAssignment listing created for each assignment.  To see this, instructors need to go to the Control Panel and click on the "Safe Assignment" link under "Course Tools".
Instructors can click on the list to see the student documents or the SafeAssignment Reports, as they become available.  If the instructor decided to let individual students see the SafeAssignment Reports associated with their own submitted papers only, at the time when the instructor set up the SafeAssignment, students will be able to view the reports as well, as they become available, by clicking on the Assignments button.

Streaming Media Examples of How to Use SafeAssignment

• Example of using Safe Assignment for single item submissions (Quick Submit Mode)
• Example of creating a new Safe Assignment in a content area and then reviewing the results

Resources

http://www.safeassignment.com

• SafeAssignment Info Brochure Low-res (PDF file, requires Adobe Acrobat - 353 KB)
• Instructor Manual (PDF file, requires Adobe Acrobat - 276 KB)
• Student Manual (PDF file, requires Adobe Acrobat - 212 KB)

• SafeAssignment REACH 2005 Meeting (PDF file, requires Adobe Acrobat - 32 KB)

If there are any questions, please email them directly to blackboard@uic.edu or itl@uic.edu.