E&H Online

How does SafeAssign work?

“SafeAssign compares submitted assignments against a set of academic papers to identify areas of overlap between the submitted assignment and existing works.

SafeAssign is effective as both a deterrent and an educational tool. Use SafeAssign to review assignment submissions for originality and create opportunities to help students identify how to properly attribute sources rather than paraphrase.

SafeAssign is based on a unique text matching algorithm capable of detecting exact and inexact matching between a paper and source material. Submissions are compared against several databases:

• Global Reference Database: Contains over 15 million papers volunteered by students from Blackboard client institutions to help prevent cross-institutional plagiarism.
• Institutional document archives: Contains all papers submitted to SafeAssign by users in their respective institutions.
• Internet: SafeAssign searches across the broader internet for matching text using an internal search service.
• ProQuest ABI/Inform Journal Database: More than 3,000 publication titles, 4.5 million documents, and over 200 topical categories from the 1970s to present time and covering topics from Advertising to Women’s Studies.” (Source: Getting Started)

Resources

• How to Enable SafeAssign (2 min video)
• How to Read Originality Report (3 min video)
• How to Interpret SafeAssign Scores (2 min read)
• Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)
• Instructor Resources
• Student Resources

Important Note

• Enable SafeAssign when creating an assignment. Students’ submitted work will not be checked for plagiarism if SafeAssign was not enabled in advance.
• SafeAssign is available for the learning activity “Assignment”, not for quizzes or discussion boards.