Service Summary | Getting This Service | Availability | Policy | Additional Information |

Service Summary

SafeAssign is a plagiarism education and prevention service available through Blackboard to all faculty, students, and staff. It supports a multi-faceted approach to teaching and learning about plagiarism. While some plagiarism may be deliberate, often it is unintentional and occurs for many reasons, including:

  • Forgetting to keep track of sources
  • Lack of clarity about how to cite sources
  • Not understanding the distinction between quoting, paraphrasing, and expressing original ideas
  • Differences between generations about what constitutes plagiarism
  • Cultural diversity may also factor into views on plagiarism

Submissions are checked against public websites, ProQuest article research databases, Mason's institutional document archive, and a global reference database to help prevent cross-institutional plagiarism.

Getting This Service

  • Instructors must log into Blackboard/Courses, open a course, and choose the location to place the SafeAssign link each time students are to submit a paper or assignment. The Originality Report on each submission can then be viewed by the instructor or teaching assistant in the SafeAssign or in the Grade Center.
  • Instructors may also directly submit a paper to receive an Originality Report or to submit it to the Institutional Search Database using the SafeAssign Course Tool.

Availability

This service is available 24/7. Outages will be announced on the Alerts & Bulletins page.

Policy

All users of the George Mason University network must adhere to University Policy Number 1301: Responsible Use of Computing.

Additional Information

  • By submitting papers, students agree to enter their document into the SafeAssign database and the SafeAssign terms of use.
  • SafeAssign accepts files in .doc, .docx, .odt, .txt, .rtf, .pdf, and .html file formats only.
  • For more information, contact Learning Support Services at 703-993-3141 or email courses@gmu.edu.

Join the Blackboard & Instructional Technologies Collective

The Blackboard & Instructional Technologies Collective is a team for Mason's faculty and staff instructional technology users to communicate with their peers and discuss new features, best practices, and other topics of interest pertaining to the following ITS-supported tools: Blackboard, Kaltura, Poll Everywhere. This is not intended to replace submitting an issue via the ITS Support Center. The collective is moderated by members of the Mason community and ITS.

Submit an ITS support request if:

  • It is something that requires an urgent/timely ITS response
  • You are requesting information or troubleshooting assistance

Post in one of the channels if:

  • You would like to share a use case or feature you’ve found helpful
  • You would like to test out a new feature with your peers
  • You would like to know how your peers are using the tools

To become a member of the Blackboard & Instructional Technologies Collective, go to https://go.gmu.edu/bbteams.