SafeAssign Originality Report Updates

To coincide with a new release of Blackboard (we will be upgrading over the summer) the SafeAssign Originality Reports have had a change of style, to make them easier on the eye.

An example of the new look and feel is below:

A long with the layout are some improvements, now when you click on some highlighted text, you are presented with the text from the document and the original source, as shown below:

A SafeAssign originality report provides detailed information about the matches found between a submitted paper and existing sources. The report identifies all matching blocks of text. You and your students need to determine if the matching text is properly referenced. Investigating each match prevents detection errors due to differences in citing standards. 

The originality report displays the list of potential sources and identifies which sources were searched to return the available results. If students cited any of the sources correctly, you can remove them from the overall score as they are not instances of plagiarism.

The "Send" feature which allowed you to send a report to another user has been removed, now you need to "Print" and choose to print as PDF, which allows you to then forward the report.

Below is a guide showing how to interpret the scores generated by the report, but as always, this is just a guide.

Sentence matching scores represent the percentage probability that two phrases have the same meaning. This number reflects the reciprocal to the probability that these two phrases are similar by chance. For example, a score of 90 percent means that there is a 90 percent probability that these two phrases are the same. There is a 10 percent probability that they are similar by chance and not because the submitted paper includes content from the existing source—whether appropriately attributed or not.

The overall SafeAssign score indicates the probability that the submitted paper contains matches to existing sources. This score is a warning indicator only. Review papers to see if the matches are properly attributed.

• Scores below 15 percent: These papers typically include some quotes and few common phrases or blocks of text that match other documents. Typically, these papers do not require further analysis as there is no evidence of plagiarism.
• Scores between 15 percent and 40 percent: These papers include extensive quoted or paraphrased material, or they include plagiarism. Review these papers to determine if the matching text is properly referenced.
• Scores over 40 percent: A very high probability exists that text in these papers was copied from other sources. These papers include quoted or paraphrased text in excess, and need to be reviewed for plagiarism.

LearnUCS SafeAssign Issues

The Elevate Team have been alerted that there appears to be an issue with SafeAssign.

When uploading zip files via Direct Submit most, if not all are being rejected as an Unsupported Format.

We have raised this as an issue with Blackboard Support and we will update once we know more.

SafeAssign Downtime - 27th December 2011

We have received notification that SafeAssign will be taken offline on December 27th for maintenance and performance upgrades.

Below is the message we have received:

SAFEASSIGN MAINTENANCE UPDATE:
The SafeAssign service will be unavailable on Tuesday December 27, 2011 from 2:00 PM until Tuesday December 27, 2011 at 8:00 PM. SafeAssign is being taken offline for a maintenance upgrade. Upon completion of this upgrade, the RSS feed will be updated to indicate SafeAssign is back online and available.

This maintenance upgrade will improve hardware failover and upgrade the software. In conjunction with version 2.4.11 of the SafeAssign Building Block to be released at the same time, this software upgrade will include several maintenance fixes, including:

• SafeAssign now displays submissions for courses that have larger rosters and SafeAssignments without significant delay. GMNIBB- 163


• SafeAssign now allows downloading of SafeAssignments that contain the forward slash (/) character in the titled. GMNIBB-168


• The correct Feedback file is attached on the SafeAssignment grade. GMNI-249
  

We are hopeful that the 3rd point above will resolve the long running issue that we have had regarding feedback not staying associated with the correct students.

During this outage SafeAssign will be unavailable. End-users will not be able to submit papers through SafeAssign during the planned downtime and will receive an error message if they attempt to do so. SafeAssign Originality Reports will not be available to Instructors or Students during the planned downtime, nor will Instructors be able to access SafeAssign DirectSubmit. Please make end-users aware of these limitations. Use of SafeAssign can continue as normal after the planned downtime are complete.

Please do not re-submit
SAFEASSIGN PERFORMANCE UPDATE:
SafeAssign is experiencing regular delays due to load on the system. In one sense, the cause of these delays is quite simple: the rate of papers being submitted exceeding the speed with which SafeAssign can process papers. Submissions go into a queue, and are processed in a first-in, first-out order. When the submissions are entering the queue faster than they are processed, a backlog builds up. Normally, SafeAssign catches up on that backlog when the submission rate drops below the processing rate. However, because of record high usage we've been pretty consistently running over capacity 24 hours a day for several weeks now (except for the US Thanksgiving weekend). So the system never fully has the time to catch up, resulting in turnaround times of 12-24 hours in many instances.

Given projections from historical usage, the significant delays of 12-24 hours or more will continue through the first week of December and then rapidly ease off in mid-December as the semester closes. Clients should expect that they will not see any significant improvement in turnaround times before mid-December. Please do not re-submit papers that have not received a matching report to prevent creating an even larger backlog.

From a development perspective, the current focus on SafeAssign is scalability and improving turnaround time of submissions. We hope to be able to deploy further improvements in this area early next year. 

SafeAssign not Returning Plagiarism Score Reports

We have received notification from Blackboard that the SafeAssign plagiarism software has had a technical problem and was taken offline to be reconfigured.  The service is now backup and running, but a large backlog of submission has occurred.

This means that if you have had or have due, student submissions, the plagiarism reports will not be produced as quickly as normal, we have had some reports taking over 24 hours at present.

Unfortunately there isn't anything that can be done to speed up the process, we just need to wait for the reports to arrive.

Sorry for any inconvenience this may cause.

 

---

I have just received more detail from Blackboard:

SafeAssign is experiencing regular delays due to load on the system. In one sense, the cause of these delays is quite simple: the rate of papers being submitted exceeding the speed with which SafeAssign can process papers. Submissions go into a queue, and are processed in a first-in, first-out order. When the submissions are entering the queue faster than they are processed, a backlog builds up. Normally, SafeAssign catches up on that backlog when the submission rate drops below the processing rate. However, because of record high usage we've been pretty consistently running over capacity 24 hours a day for several weeks now (except for the Thanksgiving weekend). So the system never fully has the time to catch up, resulting in turnaround times of 12-24 hours in many instances.

Given projections from historical usage, the significant delays of 12-24 hours or more will continue through the first week of December and then rapidly ease off in mid-December as the semester closes. Clients should expect that they will not see any significant improvement in turnaround times before mid-December.

From a development perspective, the current focus on SafeAssign is scalability and improving turnaround time of submissions. In 2011-2012, we have a two-phase project to improve performance. Phase 1, executed over the summer, was replacement, upgrade, and expansion of the entire hardware environment in which SafeAssign runs. This was necessary to assure being able to move SafeAssign forward. However new/additional hardware is not the sole solution to the problem, as some bottlenecks in processing are a result of the application itself. The second phase, underway this fall and into 2012, is a detailed performance analysis of the SafeAssign application itself to determine the bottlenecks in the processing that continue to create backlogs/slowdowns, and to identify the associated development effort to rectify those bottlenecks.

There are some improvements that have already been identified. We will be put these initial improvements in place as soon as possible. At this time, though, we are not able to quantify the impact of these planned changes on turnaround time, as the performance analysis is ongoing.

- An Update - Feedback in Gradebook Assigned to Incorrect Students

Further to this post in December we have now managed to replicate the problem and screen capture it happening, which we have now sent to Blackboard.

The Cause: When a lecturer submits feedback for a number of students and then decides to check that the correct feedback has been added, they are clicking the "Submit" button again when navigating away from the screen, this is making SafeAssign resubmit the last file uploaded and therefore overwriting the previously uploaded feedback.

Status: Open – Reported to Blackboard, Blackboard are investigating.

Fix: Currently there is no fix

Work-around: The easy work-aroud, after uploading feedback and returning to the screen to check the correct feedback is there Do not click "submit" to leave the page, instead click "Gradebook" either in the left control panel menu or in the breadcrumbs.

Click here to view the screen capture and see the issue happening.

We will report back here once we hear back from Blackboard.