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 to raise student awareness about plagiarism and to educate students about the ways to avoid plagiarizing.

SafeAssignment is 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.

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.

To submit a paper:

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

2. In the Paper Submission form (Fig. 2-2), 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.

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 2-3).

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.

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.

SafeAssignment Originality Report page (Fig 2-4) 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) - (this feature is usually disabled for students) 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.

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.