Illinois Compass 2g, SafeAssign

SafeAssign is a plagiarism-detection tool option that is integrated within Assignments.

If you wish to have your students submit their papers to SafeAssign, students can upload their paper, and you and the student can both receive a detailed Originality Report analyzing the paper’s content and notifying you of any instances of copied text.

How to create a SafeAssignment

1. From any content page, click Assessments.
2. Scroll down to, and select, Assignment.
3. Enter all relevant information for the Assignment (name of assignment,  instructions, due date (optional), points, etc.)
4. Click on the "Submission Details" link.
5. Next to Plagiarism Tools, you can check

 

Check submissions for plagiarism using SafeAssign, which allows a regular assignment to be checked for plagiarism,

Allow students to view SafeAssign originality report for their attempts, which allows students to see the Originality Report generated by SafeAssign,

and/or Exclude submissions, which will check the document for plagiarism without adding the document to the resource database.

• Note: You will want to check this box if you want the SafeAssignment to be a draft, not a final version of the uploaded file. Checking the Exclude Submissions allows your students to submit a draft of their paper and receive an originality report and then resubmit that content without penalty or a report flagging all of the content as having been previously submitted/published.

  1. Note: If you select Draft, and you wish for your students to submit a final copy of the assignment, you will have to create an additional SafeAssignment for the final submission. For example, if you created “Moby Dick Reading Response” as a draft SafeAssignment, you would have to create an additional “Moby Dick Reading Response” SafeAssignment and not check Exclude Submission for that SafeAssignment.

  2. The Draft option currently only allows for one draft submission per assignment.

  3. The Draft option does not add content to the Institutional Database.

 

6. Finalize any other options for the assignment and then click Submit.

You have now created a SafeAssignment.

How to view a report

Once a student has uploaded his or her paper, and SafeAssign has returned a report on the paper’s originality, you can check the report by using the following steps:

1. From the Course Management menu, select Course Tools.
2. Choose SafeAssign.
3. Click the SafeAssign Items link.
4. Go to the title of the SafeAssignment you want to analyze and click the downward (action) arrows below its title.
5. Click View Submissions.
6. For each student that has submitted a paper, you will see the following (if you see dashes in some columns, this means that the paper was submitted, but an originality report has not been returned yet. Please allow an hour to pass and return to the submission to see if a report has been returned):

 

Text:	Click the icon to see an online, formatted version of the paper text.
File:	Click the  icon to download the actual file the student submitted
Matching:	Percentage of the paper that matched existing database documents*
SA Report:	Click the icon to view the SafeAssign Originality Report.
Submitted:	The date and time the student submitted the paper. Note that SafeAssign will not mark a paper as late, but you can use the date stamp to determine if it was submitted past the due date.

 

* SafeAssign has designated the following percentages for original content versus previously-published content.

Scores below 15%: These papers include some quotes and few common phrases or blocks of text that match other documents. These papers typically do not require further analysis, as there is no evidence of the possibility of plagiarism in these papers.

Scores between 15% and 40%: These papers include extensive quoted or paraphrased material or they may include plagiarism. These papers should be reviewed to determine if the matching content is properly attributed.

Scores over 40%: There is a very high probability that text in this paper was copied from other sources. These papers include quoted or paraphrased text in excess and should be reviewed for plagiarism.

Tips

• SafeAssign accepts files in .doc, .docx, .odt, .txt, .rtf, .pdf, and .html file formats only.
• Files larger than 10 Mbytes or 5000 sentences of text are automatically rejected.
• SafeAssign reports are not generated instantaneously; it usually takes from several seconds to a few minutes to receive a report for each paper.
• The time to receive a report may be higher during periods of heavy use (e.g., the end of a semester) or for lengthy or image-heavy papers.
• ­You and your students will have to set your web browser to always allow cookies (or allow all third-party cookies) in order for all of SafeAssign’s features to work properly. You can change your settings back to your preferred settings when you are not working with SafeAssign.

Video

Here is a video explaining how to use SafeAssign created by Blackboard: How to use SafeAssign in Assignments (external link).