Viewing and Interpreting SafeAssign Originality Reports

The SafeAssign Originality Report allows you to see the potential areas of overlap between a student’s submitted work and other source materials. It is effective as both a deterrent and an educational tool.

The Originality Report displays the list of potential sources, and each source is highlighted in a different color.

Faculty should review all SafeAssign Originality Reports and make an independent determination as to whether plagiarism has occurred or not. The Originality Report shows you all matching blocks of text, but false positives can occur due to many factors, including incorrectly formatted citations and differences in citing standards.

Finding the Report

Faculty can view the originality report from the grading area panel.

Attachments

If the student includes more than one attachment with an assignment, they are listed in the report. Select a file name link to view the file's text in the left panel and view its word count in the right panel.

Multiple Attempts

SafeAssign recognizes multiple attempts for an individual assignment as submitted by the same student for the same assignment. SafeAssign doesn't check the contents of the current attempt against content from previous submissions as long as they are attempts within the same assignment. If a student submits the same paper for two different assignments, even if they are related assignments in the same course, will return a 100% match the second time.

Report Areas

(1) Report Summary

Select “Access Report Summary” to view the Overall Risk of improper citations in the paper, including the percent of matching or similar text. If the student included multiple attachments, they appear with the report information.

(2) Submission

The submission appears in the left panel of the report. All matching blocks of text are identified. Each source has a color specific to the source—up to 30 unique colors for 30 different sources. Text matching a source is highlighted in the source color and identified with a number. In the Citations panel, you can select Highlight match to turn source highlighting off and on for all sources at one time. You can turn the highlighting off and on for only one citation. Select Remove or Highlight match next to a citation.

Select a matching block of text to display information about the original source and the probability that the block or sentence was copied from the source.

(3) All Sources

The originality report lists all matches in the right-hand panel. The originality report groups all matches by the database. A user can expand or collapse each source group title to reveal the group's matches in probability order. Select the source type to learn more about the match. For each source, a number appears that corresponds with the highlighted text in the submission. Next to the source, you can select Highlight match to toggle highlighting. If available, you can also select Open match source to visit the matching source text in a new window.

Users can't view the full source for matches listed under the Global database source grouping. Submissions within the Global database source grouping are associated with other institutions, and the user may not be able to view them due to privacy laws.

Interpreting the Scores

Sentence matching scores represent the percentage probability that two phrases have the same meaning. This number reflects the reciprocal to the probability that these two phrases are similar by chance. For example, a score of 90 percent means that there is a 90 percent probability that these two phrases are the same. There is a 10 percent probability that they are similar by chance and not because the submitted paper includes content from the existing source—whether appropriately attributed or not.

The overall SafeAssign score indicates the probability that the submitted paper contains matches to existing sources. This score is a warning indicator only. Review papers to see if the matches are properly attributed.

Low: Scores below 15 percent: These papers typically include some quotes and few common phrases or blocks of text that match other documents. Typically, these papers don't require further analysis as there is no evidence of plagiarism.
Medium: Scores between 15 percent and 40 percent: These papers include extensive quoted or paraphrased material, or they include plagiarism. Review these papers to determine if the matching text is properly referenced.
High: Scores over 40 percent: A very high probability exists that text in these papers was copied from other sources. These papers include quoted or paraphrased text in excess, and need to be reviewed for plagiarism.

This tutorial was sourced from: Blackboard Inc. (ND). Blackboard Help: SafeAssign Originality Report. Retrieved from https://help.blackboard.com/SafeAssign/Instructor/Grade/Originality_Report