Plagiarism Checking: Directly Submitting Documents to SafeAssign

We have chosen SafeAssign as our plagiarism checking service, since it is fully integrated into the Blackboard learning system. There are actually two different ways to use SafeAssign. The simplest involves creating a "Safe Assignment" in your Blackboard course (following these instructions). Under this scenario, students submit the assignment via Blackboard, and SafeAssign compares the student submission with a local and a global database of previously submitted and publicly available work, to provide an "originality report". You view those reports following these instructions.

A second way to use SafeAssign is to "Direct Submit" an electronic copy of a paper that you suspect might contain language borrowed from other sources. Under that scenario, you would have (for example) a copy of the Word file that the student submitted to you via email, or you might have a paper copy that you would need to scan to PDF form to submit to SafeAssign. If you need to scan that paper copy to PDF, you can use any of the Canon copier/scanners available on campus, which will email the PDF document to you. Your department secretary should be able to help you with that part of the process, or you can contact Administrative Services by phone (7-3745) or by email for more information.

Once you have an electronic copy of the student paper, the "Direct Submit" process has two steps:


Directly Submitting the Paper to SafeAssign

To direct submit an electronic version of a student essay to SafeAssign:

  1. Log in to Blackboard (opens in new window), and click on any one of your current courses among the list of "Courses you are teaching" in the My Courses section of the opening page. You could choose the Blackboard course in which the student is enrolled, although SafeAssign saves the submitted papers based on the account of the instructor who "direct submitted" the files, so you will access the same list of "direct submitted" files no matter which course you start in.

  2. Within the course you have selected, go to the Control Panel by clicking on the Control Panel icon near the bottom of the left-hand navigation menu.

  3. Within the Control Panel, in the Course Tools box on the left-hand side of the page, click on the SafeAssign link:

    SafeAssign Link

  4. At the top of the page, just under the bread-crumb trail, you will see a "Safe Assignments" tab and a "Direct Submit" tab. Click on the "Direct Submit" tab:

    Click on Direct Submit Tab

  5. You may have to click on an OK Button button to clear out a "Security Alert," since you will be connecting to the SafeAssign via a secure connection. You will be taken to a Private Direct Sumbit page. On that page, click on the Submit Papers button:

    Submit Papers Button

  6. On the Paper Submission page, in the Submission Options section, you'll want to leave those two options ("Submit as draft," and "Skip Plagiarism Checking") unchecked. In the File upload section, click on the Browse button to search for the file to upload:

    Browse for File

  7. In the Choose file dialog box, you'll need to navigate to the place on your hard drive where you saved the student file. This assumes, of course, that you've already downloaded the PDF or Word file from your email account, whether it was scanned or submitted to you. Once you have found the correct folder, double-click on the name of the file to select it:

    Choose First Zip File

  8. Scroll down to the bottom of the page, and click on the Submit Button button to send the files to SafeAssign for plagiarism checking.

  9. Once the essay has been submitted, you will return to the Private Direct Submit page. You will see a spreadsheet-like view, listing the file name of the paper submitted, with a paper-clip (Paper-Clip Icon) icon in the File column, which allows you to access a copy of the document you submitted. The final column will list the date and time you submitted the file to SafeAssign. You won't see any matching score in the "Matching" column or check mark in the "SA Report" column yet, since you just submitted the essay.

  10. If you have other files to submit, you can repeat Steps 5 through 8 above to "Direct Submit" those files for plagiarism checking, too.

  11. When you are finished submitting files, you can use the "bread-crumb trail" at the top of the page to return to the Control Panel for your course, or you can exit out of Blackboard, if you were only submitting the file(s) to SafeAssign and don't need to do any other Blackboard-related work for the course:

    Bread Crumb Trail


Viewing the Originality Report Generated by the SafeAssign Server

Usually, the SafeAssign server will generate an "Originality Report" within 30 minutes after you direct submit the paper for checking. To see that report:

  1. Log in to Blackboard (opens in new window), and click on any one of your current courses among the list of "Courses you are teaching" in the My Courses section of the opening page. You could choose the Blackboard course in which the student is enrolled, although SafeAssign saves the submitted papers based on the account of the instructor who "direct submitted" the files, so you will access the same list of "direct submitted" files no matter which course you start in.

  2. Within the course you have selected, go to the Control Panel by clicking on the Control Panel icon near the bottom of the left-hand navigation menu.

  3. Within the Control Panel, in the Course Tools box on the left-hand side of the page, click on the SafeAssign link:

    SafeAssign Link

  4. At the top of the page, just under the bread-crumb trail, you will see a "Safe Assignments" tab and a "Direct Submit" tab. Click on the "Direct Submit" tab:

    Click on Direct Submit Tab

  5. You may have to click on an OK Button button to clear out a "Security Alert," since you will be connecting to the SafeAssign via a secure connection. You will be taken back to the Private Direct Sumbit page.

  6. You will see a list showing the paper (or papers) that you have submitted directly to SafeAssign. If the report is ready, there will be a match score in the "Matching" column, and you'll also see the SafeAssign SafeAssign Icon icon in the "SA Report" column. You can click on that icon to see the SafeAssign report.

    We explain in more detail how to interpret SafeAssign "originality reports" in the related document, Viewing Originality Reports (for student-submitted SafeAssignments).

    To reiterate the main points that we express there, the matching score will usually be greater than 0%, since SafeAssign tags quoted passages as "copied", because they match exactly the language of the source (when quoted correctly). Also, SafeAssign catches plagiarism only when it has a copy in its database of the written work that was plagiarized. If the article is in a journal that requires a subscription or if the material is from a book (or other printed document) that hasn't been quoted often, it's very likely that SafeAssign won't catch the copying. Even if the matching score is low, it's possible that the student work represents plagiarism. You still need to rely on your judgment when you suspect that the student's work is not original.

Last revised December 5, 2008.  Please send questions or comments to itec@bucknell.edu.