To submit a paper to SafeAssignment, please follow the steps described below:

1. Login to Blackboard and go to the corresponding course page.

2. Click on the "Assignments" link in the left navigation menu to see the list of assignments available for submission. (You may need to click the name of the folder that contains assignments). Safe Assignments are identified with the special icon (see the figure) followed by an assignment description and a “View/Complete” link.

3. Click on the "View/Complete" link below the assignment you would like to submit. You will see the Safe Assignment Upload Form.

4. Enter any necessary comments concerning the work being submitted and click the "Browse" button to select the file with your paper for upload. After selecting the proper file click the "Submit" button to upload the paper.

IMPORTANT: The current version of SafeAssignment supports only three types of uploaded files: Microsoft Word Document (.doc), Rich Text Format (.rtf), HTML and plain text (.txt) files. Files of any other types will not be processed. Please also note that files larger than 10 Mbytes or 5000 sentences of text are automatically rejected.

NOTE: Students can view originality reports on their papers only if their instructor explicitly allowed this.

SafeAssignment automatically generates originality reports on your papers within several minutes upon submission. To view a report on any of your papers, click on the View/Complete link of the corresponding SafeAssignment. Click on the “Ok” button below the “Safe Assignment Already Completed” title.

On the following page (“View Safe Assignment”), you will see the table showing the icons linking to your paper text, the originally submitted file and the SafeAssignment report on your paper.

Click on the Text icon to view the text of your work along with your comments. It will open in a separate browser window.

To download the source file of a paper, click on the File icon.

To view the SafeAssignment report on your paper, click on the SA Report icon. For more information on originality reports please see the SafeAssignment Report section of this manual.

Note for Safari users: There is a known issue with Safari browser for Mac. The default behavior for Safari is to only accept cookies from sites that you are currently viewing. In order for SafeAssignment to display reports, this setting should be changed to accept cookies always.

The percentage in the Matching column should be interpreted as the percentage of paper matching other documents. For more information on this please see the Interpreting Scores section of this manual.

Please note that Matching and SA Report columns appear blank for papers that have not been processed yet.

Scroll the “View Safe Assignment” page down to see the grade and instructor’s feedback. Read more on this in the next manual chapter.

After your professor has evaluated your work, he or she may submit his/her feedback to your Gradebook.

1. To view your grades, click on the "Tools" link in the corresponding course.

2. Then follow the "My Grades" (or “View Grades”) link.

3. On the following page (Gradebook) click on the grade beside the assignment name.

4. The “View Safe Assignment” page will be displayed. Scroll down to see the grade, read instructor’s comments, and/or see a link to a file containing additional comments from your instructor. Note: If you attempt to open the file from your Internet Explorer or other browser window, you must have the corresponding program installed to view the document file through your browser. Otherwise, you will have to save the file and open from your word processing program.

5. From the “View Safe Assignment” page, you can also access your paper and originality report on it, as well as see the matching score and submission date.

SafeAssignment Originality Report page consists of four main sections:

• Report Information (1) – this header section contains information about the author of the paper, assignment and course the paper was submitted into, submission timestamp, matching score (2) and icons for several accessory functions;

• Suspected Sources (3) – a clickable list of matching sources including the sources that were excluded by an instructor (4) and links to the source documents with highlighted matching parts (5);

• Manuscript text (6) – the main report windows that shows the paper text with all matching sentences marked with different colors (different colors represent different sources). Clicking on any color-coded sentence pops-up a Sentence Analysis window (7);

• Sentence Analysis (7) – shows a sentence from the uploaded document along with the matching sentence from the suspected source, as well as the URL of the suspected source and the percentage of similarity between these two sentences;

• Delete Sources (4) - (this feature is usually disabled for students) allows an instructor to reprocess a paper ignoring any particular sources of matching content. This capability can be useful in order to exclude legitimate matches from the list of the suspected sources of plagiarism;

• Source Highlighting Icon (5) - opens the corresponding source document and highlights all chunks of text that are matching the submitted paper;

• Save Report to Disk (8) – allows users to store a report on a local hard-drive for future access;

• E-Mail the report (9) – sends the report as an attachment to any e-mail address you enter;

• Printable version (10) – shows a page with a printer-friendly black-and-white version of the report.

A. Sentence Matching Scores:

Sentence matching scores are the percentage probability that two sentences have the same meaning. This number can also be interpreted as the reciprocal to the probability that the two sentences are similar by chance. For example, a score of 90% means that there is 90% probability that these two sentences have the same meaning, and about 10% probability that they are similar by chance (not because of plagiarism).

B. Overall Matching Score:

Overall matching score is basically an average of all sentence scores, weighted by a) the length of the sentence; b) the "commonness" of the sentence (calculated based on the average typical frequency of usage of the words from the sentence). This score does not have a simple statistical definition, but it is very highly correlated with a) the probability that there is some text matching other documents in the paper; b) the amount of matching text in the document.

In general, this score should be treated as a warning indicator. We strongly recommend reviewing all reports with high Overall Matching Scores. For analysis of matching scores, the following interpretation scale should be used:

1. Scores below 15% - usually papers with such scores contain some quotes and few "typical" phrases that match other documents. In most cases, they do not require any further analysis, and there is no evidence of plagiarism in reports.

2. Scores between 15% and 40% - papers with such scores can either contain plagiarism or have a significant amount of quoted material. We usually recommend reviewing the reports with such scores before making any judgments about the papers.

3. Scores over 40% - papers with such scores usually contain some text copied from elsewhere, and, even if this text is properly cited, such amount of cited material is considered excessive in most cases. Therefore, such scores give a clear warning to instructors. However, there are few cases when such scores can be given to authentic papers, for example, when the paper was legitimately published online before it was sent for processing (instructors have just to "Delete" the source pointing to the legitimate copy), or when the same student has already submitted this paper or a similar paper to another class.

NOTE: SafeAssignment does NOT make any verdicts about plagiarism – it only identifies matching between blocks of text. Always keep in mind that not all marked sentences are plagiarized, and that sometimes there can be legitimate reasons for high matching scores. Also note that SafeAssignment ignores quotation marks and highlights all material in quotation marks as well – this is an intentional behavior aimed to help instructors verify validity of citations. For example, if a student paper includes three or four quotations in a row, and this block of quotations is matched to a Web page or a research paper containing the same quotations used in the same order, most probably the student used that other source as a research surrogate, and therefore the material is not used legitimately despite its citation.