Can Blackboard detect copy and paste? It is a controversial question with mixed reactions from instructors and scholars. The answer is Yes or No, depending on the individual’s perception or experience. Understanding how Blackboard’s safeassign works is critical for the instructor to check originality. Have you ever asked yourself, how accurate is safeassign? Can Blackboard see if you copy and paste? Can Blackboard’s safeassign detect papers? I know these are challenging questions, Right? But don’t worry; here, you will find answers to your questions.

Exam and assignment cheating comes with consequences for the students. Cheating is prohibited in all learning institutions; however, some students still find themselves cheating due to some reason. Cheating is increasing every academic year in the digital age, with many serving as punishment for their cheating. It pushed learning institutions to design anti-plagiarism tools such as safeassign to check and reduce cheating cases.

As an instructor, you must understand the impacts of digital tools on the learning environment put in place to support learner’s academic courses. Instructors must prioritize, practice, and reinforce academic integrity strategies to sustain learners’ integrity with the tools available, such as safeassign.

Safeassign is a plagiarism prevention tool that the instructors use to ensure the students meet the recommended originality from their submitted assignment test or exam for plagiarism detection. Digital technology is increasing online education platforms, and tools like Blackboard are becoming prevalent, raising questions about the platform’s capability to check originality.

How Do You Check Plagiarism with Safeassign?

The instructor uses safeassign to check work originality by comparing your submitted assignment against the database of other existing publications like essays, journals, etc.

Safeassign checking is based on unique text matching algorithms that can detect exact and inexact matching based on the submitted paper, as it compares billions of sources on an online platform.

The safeassign algorithm analyzes the task submitted as it optimizes the words and terms to be searched from several online database sources and returns the report as a percentage score.

The learner’s submitted task to safeassign is compared against different databases from the online platform.

The existing databases used by safeassign are as follows

1. Global reference database: The site contains more than 60 million papers from volunteer students from the blackboard users’ learning institutions to prevent plagiarism in schools.
2. Institutional document archives: The safeassign keeps all papers submitted to the site by users from various institutions. It helps them to detect any cheating student who submits the same content in the future.
3. Internet sites: Safeassign is diverse and accesses all the open websites online to match the student-submitted task with their sources.
4. Inform journal database and ProQuest ABI: It contains thousands of publications titles, millions of documents, and hundreds of categorized works from the 1970s, covering almost all, if not all, topics studied in the learning institutions.

How Long Does It Take for Safeassign to Show Results?

Safeassign response time varies based on various factors. Normally, it takes seconds or minutes to return the originality report of the content.

However, during a busy period, especially at the peak of the semester, it might take longer, a few minutes to several hours, because the site is busy with many assignments in the queue.

When the safeassign has many requests, it can take up to 24 hours to respond to the user’s request.

Safeassign also delays generating plagiarism reports when it is under maintenance and has some issues associated with its site.

Safeassign supports a maximum of 10 MB file, and for any file exceeding the set limit, the tool cannot generate its originality report.

The size limit is set by the blackboard and works on all Safeassign servers accessed by all students globally.

How Does the Safeassign Tool Work?

Safeassign can be used in two ways.

1. First, the school can set up safeassign tools in their courses on the blackboards and allow the learners to submit their completed assignments. The task will be delivered through the school blackboard learning system and automatically accompanied by a safeassign originality report.
2. The second way is that the school teachers or students can upload a paper to safeassign directly without the students’ direct submission to automatically detect the originality.

The instructor in charge of safeassign can allow the students to view their Safeassign originality report from their submitted task.

What File Format Does Safe Assign Support?

Safeassign supported file is a critical question you must understand before submitting your file for the check. Normally, safeassign supports several file formats such as docx, doc, ppt, txt, pptx, pdf, html, and rtf.

When a user submits a file that is different from the recommended format, it will not produce original results.

What is Copy and Paste in Blackboard?

A blackboard is an online teaching and learning tool that helps learners receive the required information from teachers on time. The blackboard learning is flexible and ensures the learners have access to the desired content, and the teachers can engage in discussion with the students through this platform.

Blackboard learning makes it easy for teachers to utilize online space to teach students in the normal style.

You can easily copy and paste the tests, assignments, discussions, and even journals on blackboard.

However, copying someone’s work and pasting it into the assignment and exam is cheating and called plagiarism.

Can Blackboard Detect Copy and Paste?

The answer is yes.

Safeassign is the tool in the blackboard that checks your work to detect if it is similar to other people’s work.

If safeassign finds a match, it raises a flag for plagiarism, detects where you copied the work from, and highlights a particular original source.

Safeassign will provide a report that shows the percentage of the copied work from various sources.

A challenge is that the safeassign might not capture all plagiarized content, especially if it changes and does not detect AI-written content.

The students are recommended to use their own words in writing to ensure what they share in the assignment is their original work, and they have to cite any work they get from a different source.

As an instructor, you need to use various ways to check on the student’s progress and ensure every learner is doing their work independently. This will be a good way of nurturing learners in the right direction.

Blackboard detects plagiarism to prevent students from cheating and helps them produce their original work. Cheating in assignments and exams does not help the learners; rather, it makes them learn to depend on others, and it makes them incompetent as they enter the career market.

Blackboard is made of tools that help detect plagiarized work.

• Lockdown browsers

It prevents the learners from accessing other sites to find answers from external sources like websites during tests, quizzes, or any assignment task.

• Randomization of question

The tool asks questions randomly to prevent the learners from swapping answers from the given source.

• Timed assessment

The learners are given timed testing, and limited time prevents them from accessing other materials to copy and paste content.

• Integrate with test proctoring software

The third-party test proctoring is integrated with blackboard to detect the ongoing students’ unusual behaviors, which suggests cheating.

How Does the Blackboard Safeassign Detect Students’ Unusual Patterns?

Safeassign is the main blackboard anti-plagiarism tool for detecting cheating among students.

It compares the learners’ submitted tasks against their database, consisting of millions of internet pages for nonacademic and academic articles and journals at any level.

Safeassign scans the submitted task to find any match with their database and generate the originality report. The report shows the submitted task’s percentage score if it matches the existing safeassign database.

The generated report is detailed, and it shows specific sentences plagiarized and the source from which it was copied. The report takes a few minutes to be generated; however, it can take longer if there are other assignments in the queue.

The report released depends on the users’ settings. Safeassign highlights the work, and not all show plagiarized work; some can show correctly used idioms, cited quotes, and other keywords or common phrases that do not reflect plagiarism.

How Accurate is Safeassign Tool?

Safeassign is widely used in many schools; however, its accuracy is mainly reliable in detecting plagiarized content.

The AI-written content cannot be detected with safeassign because, like other plagiarism checker tools, they mainly depend on text-matching algorithms to detect plagiarized work.

Recommended Practices to Avoid Plagiarism on Blackboard

Students who want to avoid being involved in plagiarism cases should strive to avoid or do the following:

• Learn and understand what plagiarism is in academics

Plagiarism content captures diverse academic-related materials. It is not only about copying another person’s written ideas and claiming to be yours. It also involves copying images and concepts from a different source without citing the source.

The students should have deeper knowledge of plagiarism to avoid making the same mistake continuously.

• Learn proper citation

Citation knowledge is not only beneficial to plagiarism issues, but it is also useful for the student expressing your work well as one qualification to gain a desired score on a test.

Citations can be in various styles, such as MLA, APA, Harvard, and Chicago. The student should be familiar with these styles to cite their work appropriately.

Citation helps the instructor understand that the student has acknowledged the work’s original author. In such a case, the work submitted through safeassign will not detect the cited work as plagiarized.

• Learn and put it in your own words

As a student, study all the recommended materials to understand the concept in a way that you can put in your own words.

Explain everything in your own words clearly and understandably.

Don’t write randomly, fixing words from here and there. It is recommended that you do it in an orderly manner to ensure that your work is presentable and attractive and meets the academic requirements of the assignment test or exam.

• Mix it up and cite everything

Your assignment must be detailed, combining your thoughts with analysis.

Your work should be well cited, especially if you are not sure of the content; cite it to be on the safe side and escape plagiarism issues.

Your work must be backed up with reputable quotes and cited sources to make it presentable and of high quality.

In your work, you must cite different sources such as books, recommended websites, academic journals, and recommended videos to support your work.

Safeassign Blackboard Limitations

• Limited on text matching

It compares the student-submitted work with the existing millions of papers in other databases and highlights where words match another from their databases. However, when the student paraphrases the content or ideas in their own words, it becomes difficult for it to detect a match.

• Failure to detect AI-written content

The AI writing tools generate content that is unique and not plagiarized from the existing documents; therefore, safeassign cannot detect plagiarism from the AI original text. The educators are challenged to detect the copied work unless they use extra tools to detect AI content.

• Limited databases

There are limited databases on which safeassign depends; it relies only on comprehensive databases when there are still billions of essays on websites. If the safeassign algorithms do not match the existing database, it cannot detect a match.

• Analyze the surface level

Plagiarism tools like safeassign are detection tools that only analyze the surface of the text by comparing the words matching the student task with other sources on the internet. However, they fail to provide details in their detection to understand the main meaning behind some text. They struggle to identify AI-written generated content.

Comparison Safeassign and Turnitin Plagiarism Tool

Safeassign and Turnitin are common plagiarism checkers; however, they differ in various aspects.

Safeassign tool compares the submitted assignment with existing publications to identify the areas of similarity. Safeassign is a built-in application on the blackboard. Turnitin compares the students’ assignments and generates a similarity report to show plagiarized areas. Turnitin is an external application built into the blackboard.

Using safeassign improves the learners’ writing skills because of the provided originality report, which enhances their independent writing. The learners can access the feedback from their assessment, engage with it, and understand where to improve their work.