
SAFE ASSIGN - teachers be aware, students beware
SafeAssign™ is a plagiarism prevention service, offered by Blackboard to its Blackboard Learning System Enterprise, Vista Enterprise and CE Enterprise clients. This service helps educators prevent plagiarism by detecting unoriginal content in student papers. In addition to acting as a plagiarism deterrent, it also has features designed to aid in educating students about plagiarism and importance of proper attribution of any borrowed content
How Does it Work?
SafeAssign can be used in two ways.
- Instructors can set up SafeAssignments in their Blackboard courses and let students submit papers to these assignments. As students submit papers, they are checked against SafeAssign's comprehensive databases of source material. The papers will then be delivered to instructors through Blackboard together with the originality reports and the results of the matching process attached to them.
- Instructors may upload papers directly with the Direct Submit feature, without student involvement.
Matching Process
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.


