Summary
We recommend that you use Assignments instead of Direct Submit, as this complies with the University’s Dishonest Practice Policy, which states that students should be allowed one “Draft” submission where they can read the SafeAssign report before they submit their “Final” assignment.
However, there are some circumstances (for example, where you need to re-submit a student assignment for some reason) where you need to submit the file yourself, and you can do this by using “Direct Submit”.
Resources
- Direct Submit overview (blackboard.com)
- Blackboard Anti-Plagiarism Training Course (view dates & times)
Content
Before you start: acceptable file types
It is important that you ask your students to submit their files in a format which can be read by SafeAssign. Microsoft Works saves files in .wps format by default, which is not supported by SafeAssign. We recommend instructing your students to save their files as rich text files (.rtf) if they are using Microsoft Works.
Microsoft Office saves files in .doc or .docx formats by default. Both of these are fine.
The supported file types are:
- Zip file: .zip (recommended)
- Word document: .doc, .docx
- OpenOffice document: .odt
- Plain text file: .txt
- Portable document format: .pdf
- Rich text file: .rtf
- Web page: .html
Submitting files to SafeAssign
If you have more than one file you can zip them together so you only need to upload once.
1. Log into Blackboard, and click on the name of paper to upload the files to.
2. Click on Control Panel > Course Tools, then click on the “SafeAssign” . Note that the SafeAssign section is hosted on Blackboard’s company servers in the US, so you may notice that it behaves a little slower than the rest of Blackboard.
3. Click on “Direct Submit”.
4. By default, SafeAssign will display your PRIVATE file submission area. Any files submitted here will follow you around from paper to paper, and will not be visible to any other staff teaching this paper. We recommend not submitting files in this area.
Click on the Shared button to enter the submission area for this paper. Any files submitted here will stay in this paper, and will not follow you around from paper to paper.
5. Set up a folder for this assignment/essay by typing a name in the “New Folder” box, then click Add. You can skip this step if someone has already created a folder for this assignment.
6. Click on the name of the folder you have just created.
7. Click Submit a Paper.
8. Beside “File to Attach”, click “Choose File” and find the zip file of assignments on your computer (or a single assignment if you are submitting them one by one). Click Choose to select it.
9. Click Submit. After the files have been submitted, they will appear in the files list, but the reports and match scores will be blank until the assignments have been checked.
10. Wait for the report to be generated. This may be anything from a couple of seconds to a couple of hours, depending on how busy the SafeAssign server is. You will need to refresh the page, either by clicking “Private” then “Shared”, or going back to the Control Panel and then re-entering SafeAssign to see the completed reports. You will know they have been checked because they will have a match score, and a green tick in the “SA Report” column. Our reports have 100% match scores, because we have submitted the same reports more than once, so they are matching with previously submitted copies.
11. When the report has been generated, you can now click on the green tick to view the report. If you want to download the file, click on the green arrow in the “File” column. To view SafeAssign’s text version of the assignment, click on the file name in the “Filename” column.
