SafeAssign is a tool that students can use to ensure that they cite their written work properly, and one that you can use to check their work for accidental or intentional plagiarism after they submit it. Many students commit plagiarism unintentionally because they don't understand the rules, or because it's so easy to do a copy/paste from a digital source.

Encourage your students to follow these three general rules to avoid accidental plagiarism:

1. Unless a passage of text is in quotes, the source text should be re-stated in your own words.
2. Direct quotes should be used sparingly, and only for very important passages of text.
3. Unless a statement is common knowledge, you should cite the source of the idea.

If you have additional rules, be specific. For example, is there a particular citation style such as APA, MLA, Chicago, etc. that you expect them to use? Give them some examples of proper citation.

We encourage you to review the rules and consequences with them, and to have them check their writing using the Safe Assign Originality Report before they submit their work to you for final grading. Checking student writing through an interative process of rough drafts with feedback discourages procrastination, and helps students to improve their writing.

One final piece of advice: If possible, design your assignment so that it is less of a "fact dump" and more of a defense of a point of view or an opinion on a controversial topic. This makes it harder to plagiarize, more interesting for you (you don't have to read a bunch of versions of the same report) and it makes it easier to tell if your students have a grasp of the content. For a history paper, don't ask for a biography of Abraham Lincoln, but instead ask students to write about the difficult decisions he made and what they would have done in his shoes. For a genetics paper, don't ask how a gene is cloned, but instead have students argue the pros and cons of allowing genetically modified organisms.

To create a Safe Assignment:

1. Log into Bb Learn and navigate to your course.
2. In the upper right of the screen, make sure Edit Mode is ON.
3. From the Assessments menu, select Assignment.
4. On the Create Assignment page, expand Submission Details.
5. Under Plagiarism Tooks, select Check submissions for plagiarism using SafeAssign.
6. Select your options:
   1. Allow students to view the SafeAssign originality reports on their submissions. (We generally recommend this.)
   2. Exclude all student submissions for this assignment from the institutional or global reference databases. (We generally don't recommend this.)
7. Specify the other information about the assignment.
8. Click Submit