Use SafeAssign
SafeAssign is a tool built into Scholar's Assignments and Tests that allows submissions to be scanned for potential plagiarism. This tool compares the content of submissions to a database of other submitted works, as well as publically accessible texts on the internet. This comparison is intended to locate text matches that may indicate that a student copied the text into their own work. The tool then generates a report summarizing the percentage of the submission that consists of potentially-copied text vs original work. This can serve as both a detection tool, and a deterrent against potential plagiarism on key assignments.
Setting Up SafeAssign
While creating an Assignment or test, the item's settings are on the right. Just click any of them, or the gear icon at the top right, to view or edit all settings.
Scroll down and locate the setting labeled "Originality Report". Click "Enable SafeAssign" to enable the tool as well as other related settings.
Click the Enable SafeAssign toggle to turn SafeAssign on.
If you want students to see their SafeAssign reports, check the "Allow students to view the SafeAssign...." box.
If this is a partial or rough-draft submission and you are going to have the students submit a second time later, you must click the "Exclude submissions..." checkbox. This prevents the current submission from being added to the database, which keeps SafeAssign from marking the students' second submissions as plagiarized off the first.
Click the Save button to accept the settings.
Viewing SafeAssign Information
If you set up the assignment to check for plagiarism with SafeAssign, the SafeAssign score for submitted work will be found on the right-hand-side, under a section labeled Originality Report This score will be presented in the form of a percentage, representing the percent of the document's text finding matches in other sources. If the student recently submitted the assignment, the SafeAssign score may take some time to become available, as the tool has not finished scanning it to generate a full report.
Keep in mind that the SafeAssign score by itself is not, by itself, conclusive evidence of plagiarism. Instead, it can be used as a signal of whether a paper needs additional scrutiny. All SafeAssign reports should be viewed in more detail in order to determine the context of any and all matches.
If you wish to see the specific text that SafeAssign flagged, click one of the reports generated.
You’ll be taken to the SafeAssign report on a separate tab on your web browser.
You'll see the overview information on the right. Each separate course is color-coded for easy viewing. The key to the sources is found on the right side, and will list the location of any source text that was considered a match.
To remove a source from consideration, click the Dismiss Match button for the relevant source. This can be useful for filtering out false matches, such as when a paper may be legitimately quoting a properly cited source.
The document will be reprocessed, leaving out the dismissed sources. This may take several minutes, depending on the document.
In the text of the assignment, click on highlighted text to see the original source’s text in a side-by-side comparison:
After reviewing the report, close it to return to the grading page.