SafeAssignment Plagiarism Detection Service for the MyDropBox AMS is an advanced plagiarism prevention system deeply integrated with the MyDropBox AMS and other MyDropBox products. SafeAssignment automatically compares all student papers submitted to MyDropBox against a wide range of sources and provides instructors with detailed Originality Reports. Because of SafeAssignment’s flexibility, its use is not limited to catching cheaters – this product is also an effective plagiarism prevention system that helps instructors to raise student awareness about plagiarism and to educate students about the ways to avoid plagiarizing.

SafeAssignmentis based on a unique text matching algorithm that is capable of detecting even inexact matching between a plagiarized paper and its source. This advanced capability makes it virtually impossible to hide plagiarism from SafeAssignment by modifying copied text, thus making students learn to cite information sources properly instead of trying to disguise plagiarism by paraphrasing.

SafeAssignment is focused on teaching students to avoid plagiarism rather than on just identifying offenders. SafeAssignment’s “Draft Assignment” and “Student Report” features give students an opportunity to submit drafts of their papers for checking and receive SafeAssignment reports highlighting all text that needs to be referenced. This learning mode of SafeAssignment can be enabled by instructors on per-assignment basis and is very effective in preventing unintentional plagiarism.

SafeAssignment searches an enormously wide range of databases, covering virtually all potential sources of electronic plagiarism:

• The index of the Internet (close to 8 billion documents);

• All major publicly accessible digital databases, such as MedLine, PubMed, Project Guttenberg™ (over 12,000 books) and other;

• The FindArticles™ database provided by LookSmart™ (over 5.5 million articles from over 900 periodical publications, updated daily);

• The entire family of the ProQuest™ ABI/Inform databases (over 1100 publication titles, about 2.7 million articles, updated weekly);

• MyDropBox’s proprietary database of over 300,000 academic papers that are known to be offered for sale by paper-mill Web sites;

• Any proprietary institutional archives and databases that MyDropBox clients provide for inclusion into the search span of their respective institutional accounts;

• ZIP archives and some password-protected areas available on the Internet indexed on demand.

SafeAssignment is closely tied with the MyDropBox AMS Assignment handling functionality, so to understand this manual you first need to review the corresponding section of the [MyDropBox AMS Student Manual], as the SafeAssignment User Manual describes mainly the additional functionality provided by the SafeAssignment module of the MyDropBox AMS.

You can view and manage your Assignments and paper submissions from the Assignments section of any of your Courses. To get to the Assignments section:

1. Click the Courses tab to open the list of your Courses.

2. Click on the name of any of your Courses to display the Assignments section of the Course (Fig 2-1).

1. Once you are on the Assignments page of the necessary Course (Fig 2-1), click on the Create New Assignment link located above the list of all registered Assignments. Note that you can also create Assignments by clicking on the Create New Assignment link in the Common Tasks box on the Instructor Homepage.

2. In the Create New Assignment form (Fig 2-2), enter the following data:

• a. Assignment title
• b. Start date – the date when the Assignment becomes available for submission. It should be either the current date (for immediate availability of the Assignment) or some date in the future
• c. Due date — the date which is marked as the Due Date of the Assignment in the student Calendars (NOTE: Assignments are still open for submission on and after the Due Date to allow for late submissions. Late submissions can be identified by timestamps on the reports)
• d. Highest possible grade for this Assignment (in points, “0” means that the Assignment is not graded in the Gradebook)
• e. Assignment description (optional)
• f. The Course to create this Assignment for (leave unchanged unless you used the Common Task link)
• g. “Draft assignment” – if this checkbox is enabled, papers submitted into the assignment would not be taken into consideration as potential plagiarism sources for papers submitted to any other Assignments. This setting prevents matching of drafts to final versions of the same papers and allows instructors to create “sand-boxes” where students can do self-checks to see if all of the external materials in their papers are properly referenced.
• h. “Let students view their reports” – this setting lets students see originality reports on their own papers (by default, only the Instructor can access this data). Also, if the checkbox is enabled, every student will receive an email notification when his/her report is ready. Generally, this check box should be checked for Draft assignments.

3. Click the Submit button. You will be forwarded to the Assignments section of the corresponding Course.

1. Once you are on the Assignments page of the corresponding Course, click the Edit icon next to the Assignment you want to view or modify (the rightmost column of the list).

2. In the Edit Assignment Info form (same as Fig 2-2), find the necessary data and/or edit the fields you need to modify.

3. Click the Submit button to save changes.

1. Once you are on the Assignments page, check the checkboxes next to the Assignments you want to delete.

2. Click the Delete button to remove the selected Assignments and related data from the course.
NOTE: If you remove an Assignment from a Course, you will lose all the data related to this Assignment. Therefore, it is recommended to avoid deleting any Assignments except those Assignments that were created by mistake.

The recommended usage scenario for MyDropBox is to let students submit their own papers online. However, instructors can submit papers from their instructor interfaces as well.

To submit a paper:

1. Once you are on the Assignments page of the corresponding Course, click the Submit icon of the corresponding Assignment in the list of Assignments.

2. In the paper submission form (Fig 2-3), choose the student you want to submit a paper for, enter the title of the paper, choose the submission option and either click the Browse button to select the file for upload or copy and paste the text of the paper into the text area of the form (use the copy-paste method only if you cannot upload a file of a supported format).

3. Click the Preview button to preview the text of the paper before submitting it or click the Submit button to submit the paper without previewing.

IMPORTANT: MyDropBox supports the following types of uploaded files only: Microsoft Word Document (.doc), Rich Text Format (.rtf), Adobe Acrobat Portable Document Format (.pdf), HTML (.htm) and plain text (.txt) files. Files of all other types will not be processed.

The MyDropBox QuickSubmit tool enables instructors to quickly check a suspicious student paper or a batch of papers packed into a .ZIP file for plagiarism. This feature is recommended for use only when it is impossible or inconvenient to organize submission of papers to MyDropBox by students. One example of a scenario when this tool can be used is when an instructor has already collected papers from students via email or any other paper submission interface, and now needs to generate Originality Reports on those papers. Quick Submissions are not connected to Assignments registered in MyDropBox, and do not require registration of an Assignment as a prerequisite. However, these submissions are organized into folders to provide Instructors with a basic grouping ability and keep submissions organized.

2.5.1. QuickSubmit Screen

After clicking a "Quick-Submit" tab in the main menu an all-in-one Quick-Submit Screen is displayed (Fig. 2-4):

Fig. 2-4

From this screen, you can do the following:

• Manage folders:

• ° To create a folder, enter a new folder name into the corresponding input field and press the “Create” button
• ° To delete one or several folders, check the checkboxes next to the corresponding folder names and press the “Delete” button

• Submit papers:

• ° Select the folder you want to submit a paper or a batch of papers into by clicking on the corresponding folder name
• ° Fill in the paper submission form (you can upload either individual paper or a .ZIP archive with multiple papers)
• ° Press the “Submit” button to finalize the submission

• View submitted papers and Originality Reports:

• ° All papers in the current folder are displayed in a table with links to paper source files and Originality Reports. The table also display paper submission dates for your convenience.

• Delete submitted papers:

• ° Select the necessary folder
• ° Check the checkboxes next to the papers you want to delete
• ° Click the “Delete” button

To submit a paper:

1. Once on the Assignments page (Fig. 2-5), click the Submit icon next to the corresponding Assignment

2. In the Paper Submission form (Fig. 2-6), enter the title of your paper, choose how you want to submit your paper, and either click the Browse button to pick the file for upload (recommended) or copy-and-paste the text of your paper into the text box

3. If necessary, add a comment for your instructor in the corresponding field of the form

4. Click the Preview button to make sure your paper was uploaded successfully

5. Click the Submit button to finish the submission process

IMPORTANT: MyDropBox supports the following types of uploaded files only: Microsoft Word Document (.doc), Rich Text Format (.rtf), Adobe Acrobat Portable Document Format (.pdf), HTML (.htm) and plain text (.txt) files. Please do not upload files of any other types. If you cannot save your paper to any of the supported formats, please use the Copy-and-Paste submission method.

2.7.1. Viewing Reports from the Instructor Interface

All papers submitted to a MyDropBox Assignment are listed on the Submissions page of the corresponding Assignment. To view the reports on the submitted papers:

1. Click on the Courses tab in the main menu to see the list of all your Courses.

2. In the list of the Courses, click on the name of the Course that you want to work with, and you will see the list of all Assignments registered in this Course.

3. In the list of Assignments, click on the name of the Assignment you want to view.

4. In the list of submitted papers (Fig 2-7), click on a “Report” icon of any paper to see the Originality Report generated for that paper.

Fig. 2-7

2.7.2. Viewing Reports from the Student Interface

Students can view reports only on Assignments that have student access to reports enabled by instructors. To view reports:

1. Go to the Assignments page of the corresponding Course.

2. Scroll the Assignments page down to the Completed Assignments section (Fig 2-8).

3. Click the “Report” icon next to the corresponding Completed Assignment to view the Originality Report on the paper or click the “Source File” icon to see the paper itself.

Fig. 2-8

NOTE: Originality reports become available to students only with the permission of the instructor. Therefore, a student may not be able to see the reports if instructor did not enable this feature. Also please note that Originality Reports appear after some delay necessary for information processing.

2.7.3. Originality Report Overview

Fig. 2-9

SafeAssignment Originality Report page (Fig 2-9) consists of four main sections:

• Report Information (1) – this header section contains information about the author of the paper, assignment and course the paper was submitted into, submission timestamp, matching score (2) and icons for several accessory functions;

• Suspected Sources (3) – a clickable list of matching sources including the sources that were excluded by an instructor (4) and links to the source documents with highlighted matching parts (5);

• Manuscript text (6) – the main report windows that shows the paper text with all matching sentences marked with different colors (different colors represent different sources). Clicking on any color-coded sentence pops-up a Sentence Analysis window (7);

• Sentence Analysis (7) – shows a sentence from the uploaded document along with the matching sentence from the suspected source, as well as the URL of the suspected source and the percentage of similarity between these two sentences;

• Delete Sources (4) - (available to instructors only) allows an instructor to reprocess a paper ignoring any particular sources of matching content. This capability can be useful in order to exclude legitimate matches from the list of the suspected sources of plagiarism;

• Source Highlighting Icon (5) - opens the corresponding source document and highlights all chunks of text that are matching the submitted paper;

• Save Report to Disk (8) – allows users to store a report on a local hard-drive for future access;

• E-Mail the report (9) – sends the report as an attachment to any e-mail address you enter;

• Printable version (10) – shows a page with a printer-friendly black-and-white version of the report.

2.7.4. Interpreting scores

A. Sentence Matching Scores:

Sentence matching scores are the percentage probability that two sentences have the same meaning. This number can also be interpreted as the reciprocal to the probability that the two sentences are similar by chance. For example, a score of 90% means that there is 90% probability that these two sentences have the same meaning, and about 10% probability that they are similar by chance (not because of plagiarism).

B. Overall Matching Score:

Overall matching score is basically an average of all sentence scores, weighted by a) the length of the sentence; b) the "commonness" of the sentence (calculated based on the average typical frequency of usage of the words from the sentence). This score does not have a simple statistical definition, but it is very highly correlated with a) the probability that there is some text matching other documents in the paper; b) the amount of matching text in the document.

In general, this score should be treated as a warning indicator. We strongly recommend reviewing all reports with high Overall Matching Scores. For analysis of matching scores, the following interpretation scale should be used:

1. Scores below 15% - usually papers with such scores contain some quotes and few "typical" phrases that match other documents. In most cases, they do not require any further analysis, and there is no evidence of plagiarism in reports.

2. Scores between 15% and 40% - papers with such scores can either contain plagiarism or have a significant amount of quoted material. We usually recommend reviewing the reports with such scores before making any judgments about the papers.

3. Scores over 40% - papers with such scores usually contain some text copied from elsewhere, and, even if this text is properly cited, such amount of cited material is considered excessive in most cases. Therefore, such scores give a clear warning to instructors. However, there are few cases when such scores can be given to authentic papers, for example, when the paper was legitimately published online before it was sent for processing (instructors have just to "Delete" the source pointing to the legitimate copy), or when the same student has already submitted this paper or a similar paper to another class.

NOTE: SafeAssignment does NOT make any verdicts about plagiarism – it only identifies matching between blocks of text. Always keep in mind that not all marked sentences are plagiarized, and that sometimes there can be legitimate reasons for high matching scores. Also note that SafeAssignment ignores quotation marks and highlights all material in quotation marks as well – this is an intentional behavior aimed to help instructors verify validity of citations. For example, if a student paper includes three or four quotations in a row, and this block of quotations is matched to a Web page or a research paper containing the same quotations used in the same order, most probably the student used that other source as a research surrogate, and therefore the material is not used legitimately despite its citation.