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SafeAssign in Online@UT: A How-To Guide

About SafeAssign | Student Submission Process | Accessing and Interpreting Results

SafeAssign in Online@UT

SafeAssign is a software resource designed to help students avoid plagiarism and improper citation. The software encourages original writing and proper citation practices by cross-referencing submitted materials against other submitted papers, the Internet, and numerous published jouranl, newspaper, and magazine articles. The SafeAssign tool is fully integrated into Onlien@UT, and does not require additional software.

SafeAssignments can deter plagiarism by creating opportunities to educate students on proper citation and attribution, while providing a powerful tool to detect blatant plagiarism in student papers.

How Does SafeAssign Work?

Using unique text-matching algorithms capable of detecting exact and inexact matching, SafeAssignments are compared against the following sources:

The Internet
Proquest/ABI Inform, a database with over 1,100 publication titles and over 2.6 million articles, updated weekly
Institutional database, containing all papers submitted by UTK students
Global Reference Database, to which students can voluntarily submit their papers

How to Use SafeAssign in Your Courses

SafeAssignments can very easily be created in your Online@UT course site. You'll have the opportunity to create SafeAssignments that allow students to submit their papers in draft form or for final grading. Keep in mind that a large percentage of plagiarism is unintentional. Often students don't understand how to properly cite and attribute borrowed content in their academic papers. Providing students with the opportunity to correct their papers prior to final submission is a powerful proposition.

What Does SafeAssign Tell Me?

Once a paper is submitted and processed by SafeAssign, a report is provided that details the percentage of the paper that matches existing original sources. It also provides links to the sources that returned the matching text. Because of the nature of the report, it is imperative to read and interpret each SafeAssign report carefully. The SafeAssign report, in and of itself, does not prove plagiarism occured. SafeAssign provides a sentence-matching score displayed as a percentage. This score is an indicator of what percentage of the submitted paper matches existing works, and should be treated only as a warning. The SafeAssign detail report provides much more information, and should be thoroughly reviewed when plagiarism is suspected.

Getting Started

Add a SafeAssignment to Your Course

Select Control Panel in your course site.

Select a content area into which you will add a SafeAssignment.

Select SafeAssign from the drop-down menu in the top right corner, and then select the Go button.

Provide a name for the assignment. If the assignment is a draft, indicate that in the assignment name (e.g. Paper One: Draft). Keep in mind that you will have to create a separate SafeAssignment for the final submission (e.g. Paper One: Final Submission).
Enter the points possible for the assignment.
Provide instructions for the assignment.
Select the availability option. Selecting "yes" provides student access to the assignment.
Set assignment availability dates. You may wish to set some assignment restrictions here.
Select the appropriate draft settings for the assignment. Setting the assignment in draft mode allows students to validate their papers without submitting them to the institutional database. As a result, final papers will not be compared to submitted drafts, which will result in more accurate SafeAssign reports.
Choose whether or not you want students to have access to the SafeAssign report.
Set Urgent Checking to "no".

Create an Optional Announcement if you wish.
Select Submit.
A matching item will automatically be created in the course gradebook.