North Dakota State University

SafeAssign in Blackboard

What is SafeAssign?

SafeAssign™ is a plagiarism prevention service available via Blackboard.  SafeAssign helps instructors detect and/or prevent plagiarism by detecting unoriginal content in student papers.

SafeAssign can be used in two ways. 

1. Instructors can set up SafeAssignments in their Blackboard courses and let students submit papers to these assignments, similar to the Blackboard Assignments tool.  As students submit papers, they are checked against SafeAssign's comprehensive databases of source material.  The papers will then be delivered to instructors through the Blackboard Learning System together with the originality reports, with the results of the matching process, attached to them.
2. Instructors may upload papers directly with the Direct Submit feature, without student involvement.

SafeAssign checks all submitted papers against the following databases:

• Internet - comprehensive index 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.

SafeAssign generates an Originality Report with the results of the Matching process.

How-to Tutorials

• Creating a SafeAssignment (HTML)
• Direct Submit (HTML)
• Interpreting the Reports (HTML)
• SafeAssign Instructor's Guide (PDF)