SafeAssign - Plagiarism Prevention

What is SafeAssign?
How does SafeAssign work?

What is SafeAssign?

The University has decided not to renew its license with Turnitin for the 2007-2008 academic year. SafeAssign is Blackboard's own plagiarism prevention tool and is currently available for all Blackboard course sites.

SafeAssign works similarly to Turnitin, with some notable advantages:

  • Instructors can attach an announcement to a SafeAssign assignment, to remind students of the due date.
  • Students' intellectual property is preserved since their papers do not become part of a permanent, global database unless they opt into that database. Thus, student work is not contributing to the equity of a private company without their permission.

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How does SafeAssign work?

Students' submissions are checked against several databases of source material. 

These databases include:

  1. The internet.
  2. Proquest/ABI Inform, a database of articles from the 1990s to today, updated weekly.
  3. Institutional database, containing all papers submitted through SafeAssign by students at Stony Brook.
  4. Global Reference Database, to which students can voluntarily submit their work. All submissions to this database will be included in future checks for plagiarism.

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How do I set up and grade an assignment using SafeAssign?

Please download these instructions on how to create and grade SafeAssign assignments.
(Adobe Reader required)

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How do students submit an assignment using SafeAssign?

Please refer students to this document: SafeAssign for Students.
(Adobe Reader required)

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What kinds of files can be uploaded to SafeAssign?

The only file types supported by SafeAssign are:

  1. Microsoft Word (*.doc)
  2. PDF (*.pdf)
  3. Rich Text Format (*.rtf)
  4. Plain Text (*.txt)
  5. Web page (*.htm or *.html)
  6. ZIP files containing multiple files in any of the above formats (*.zip)

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Note to Office 2007 users!

Word 2007 saves all documents with a .docx extension by default. This file type is not recognized by SafeAssign, and students will receive an error message if they try to upload a .docx file. Please advise your students who use Office 2007 to save their documents as a "Word 97-2003 Document (*.doc)" instead of just a "Word Document." This will avoid any incompatibility issues.

Click here for step-by-step tutorial on how to save Word 2007 documents to a compatible format.

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