This message is intended to provide an update about a key concern over SafeAssign performance, and to set appropriate expectations about our actions to improve them. It’s also intended to confirm that we understand its seriousness and that it has the full attention and focus of our team at Blackboard.

First, the news. Usage of SafeAssign has been unprecedented. What we believed were accurate predictions about the performance under this level of usage during the fall proved to be too conservative. That said, the system remains stable, the quality of matching sources is unaffected, papers are being processed normally, and the processing speeds for individual papers are performing within range. The primary impact is on turnaround time for submissions due to a significant backlog of papers to process.

SafeAssign Performance Advisory: Clients should expect turnaround times for papers submitted at 3-5 days from the time of submission. We are advising that these extreme delays should be expected through the remaining days of the fall term.

The outlook: We appreciate very much the inconvenience this presents to our community, particular at this moment of semester end duties for faculty. We have recalibrated our gauge on the importance and utility of this service to our community and are shifting investment. We are already underway with efforts to produce significant improvements in our processing capacity ahead of the peak submission season in Spring 2012. We remain confident that with this additional effort that we can return queue lengths to normal levels in that span.

Support: There are no short term corrections to queue length that can be performed by our support team at this time. Instructors can still to choose to grade assignments absent the Originality Report and verify their evaluation once the Originality Report is available. However, if you have papers that have not received Originality Reports within 5 days their submission date please contact you campus support structure.