ATRC

The Safe Assign Anti-Plagiarism Service

The Safe Assign anti-plagiarism Tool is now a built-in part of Blackboard. "Safe Assign" is the name of the service. A "Safe Assignment" is the assignment created within Blackboard that students use to submit papers to the service.

"Safe Assign 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...Safe Assign can also further deter plagiarism by creating opportunities to educate students on the proper attribution and citations while properly leveraging the wealth of information at their disposal." (From "Be Original", a Blackboard Beyond initiative).

Safe Assign supports the following document formats: Word 2003 (.doc), Word 2007 and Word 2010 (.docx), rich text format (.rtf), plain text (.txt), pdf (.pdf), and html (.htm or .html) formats. Files larger than 10MB will be rejected.

It creates originality reports based on checks 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.

We have developed a set of training screencasts and PDF documents on how to use the new tool, linked from the table below. Click the icon after the topic for access.

Topic	Screencast	PDF
What is Safe Assignment?	(2:20)
How to Create a Safe Assignment	(6:12)	(837K)
Grading a Safe Assignment	(8:11)
How to use Direct Submit	(8:25)
How to Synchronize My Course	(2:11)
Safe Assignment: A Tutorial for Students	(5:50)
Safe Assign One Page Guide for Faculty Members		(25K)

If you need assistance in setting up or using the Safe Assignment Tools, do not hesitate to request technical support from Academic Technology. There are three ways to get support:

Other Resources