Do you often worry that someone might copy your work and submit it as their own? You’re not alone. Many students feel anxious about potential plagiarism, and for a good reason. Luckily, there are tools available to help you protect your work, like SafeAssign and Blackboard’s detection tools. But how well do these tools work? And how long does it take for them to detect copied text? This article will explore the answers to these questions and more. Keep reading to learn more!
What is SafeAssign, and How Does it Work?
The concept of plagiarism detection has been around for a while, but it’s only in recent years that widespread tools have been made available to students. SafeAssign is one of these tools, and its purpose is to prevent students from plagiarizing the work of others. According to Blackboard’s help center, SafeAssign compares student work to a bank of internet resources and reports matches to instructors. If SafeAssign detects a possible match with any pre-existing content, it will flag the assignment.
Blackboard’s FAQ page states that SafeAssign does not replace instructors’ responsibility to read and grade student work thoroughly. Rather, it helps “instructors focus their attention on the areas of greatest concern.”
How Blackboard’s SafeAssign Works to Detect Plagiarism?
When you upload your document to Blackboard, it is checked for copied text. The first time the document is uploaded, it will take a few seconds for this comparison. Every time the text is uploaded after that, it will take only a few milliseconds. Blackboard keeps a cache of previously checked documents and compares using that information.
Can Blackboard’s SafeAssign detect papers from Turnitin?
Yes, it can. This is because SafeAssign uses Turnitin’s API to check for plagiarism. If you’re not sure what an API is, it stands for Application Programming Interface. An API allows two computer programs to talk to each other. Turnitin has its API that SafeAssign uses to access its plagiarism-detection capabilities. Note that Turnitin’s API is not free. This means that if you are using an academic license, you will have to pay to use Turnitin’s API.
Can Blackboard SafeAssign Be Wrong?
Yes, it can be wrong. Like any other plagiarism detection software, SafeAssign is not perfect. So what distinguishes them? For one thing, the quality of the paper you submit. Quality papers are less likely to be flagged by SafeAssign than papers with multiple spelling/grammar errors. For another, the timing of when you submit your paper can make a difference. If you submit it very early in the morning or very late at night, it might not have been reviewed by a live person yet. This means that it won’t be marked as plagiarism. However, waiting too long can lead to a delayed response. Turnitin has also been known to mark legitimate papers as plagiarized due to its algorithms. This means that if you submit your paper to Turnitin and then submit it again to Blackboard, the second submission might be marked as plagiarized.
How Accurate is SafeAssign?
According to Blackboard Support, SafeAssign has a 95% accuracy rate. Some instructors have claimed that the software is only 85-90% accurate, but this is the exception rather than the rule.
How Long does SafeAssign Take to Check and Report?
Generating reports takes several seconds to a few minutes, but sometimes it can take up hours during peak use. The actual waiting time also depends on the length and quality of your paper. If you submit a paper with proper citations and no plagiarism, generating the report will usually take only a few seconds. However, if your paper is 20 pages long and has a lot of quotes, it will take longer.
How Does SafeAssign Compare to Turnitin?
SafeAssign is less expensive, but this doesn’t mean that it’s more accurate. Turnitin has a higher accuracy rate than SafeAssign, but this doesn’t mean that it’s perfect either. This is why it’s important to use both Turnitin and SafeAssign in conjunction with each other.
How Often Do you Get an Inaccurate Report?
Blackboard Support has stated that you can expect an inaccurately reported paper around 1 in 20 papers. This is a very low inaccuracy rate, especially when Turnitin reports inaccurately around 1 in 10 papers.
How does Blackboard Know What Papers are Plagiarized?
Blackboard actually partners with Turnitin for this purpose. SafeAssign works by checking your document against over twelve billion web pages in Turnitin’s database. So it is also heavily dependent on what you have cited in your paper. If a paper is properly cited, it will be less likely to be flagged as plagiarized because the source material isn’t available online. SafeAssign uses a variety of other parameters to determine whether your paper is plagiarized, but this is the primary factor.
What are the Benefits of Using SafeAssign?
There are countless benefits of using SafeAssign and among them:
- A reduction in plagiarism
- Improved instructor-student interaction
- When you use the “Copy Paste” function within Word, it is not detected by SafeAssign or Turnitin.
- It’s less expensive than Turnitin, but it is still regularly updated. It also has a higher accuracy for spotting plagiarism than other anti-plagiarism services.
What are the Drawbacks of SafeAssign?
- Aside from a few complaints about inaccuracies, the only major drawback of SafeAssign is that you cannot submit an assignment more than once. So if you submit your paper to Turnitin and then submit it again to SafeAssign, the latter submission is flagged as plagiarized.
- Blackboard SafeAssign is sometimes wrong. It can mark legitimate papers as plagiarized, or it can let in some that are plagiarized. However, the inaccuracy rate is only around 1 in 20 papers. This means that it still provides a major benefit to students and instructors alike.
How Can yoEnsure that your Papers are Plagiarism-free?
There are several ways to ensure that you avoid plagiarism. However, the simplest way is to cite all your sources in APA, MLA, or Chicago format. This lets SafeAssign know that you got your information from an external source, and it won’t detect the plagiarized parts. Just make sure that you don’t copy directly from your source material. You should paraphrase or summarize it in your own words. If you would like to learn more about avoiding plagiarism, read our article here.
Conclusion
So, what do we think? Is it possible for Blackboard to detect copy-paste? The answer is yes and no. It’s possible that SafeAssign could flag a paper if it detects large portions of the text have been copied from another source without proper citation. However, because there are no ways to format papers and citations, it’s difficult to say exactly how long the plagiarism detection process would take. In most cases, it should be fairly quick; but if you have a lot of sources or unusual formatting, it may take a little longer. Bottom line: don’t copy other people’s work – it’s not worth the risk!
