Supporting first year students at UQ: Addressing plagiarism and peer mentoring

The School of Geography, Planning and Environmental Management at The University of Queensland has introduced two key initiatives that have improved the learning outcomes of first year students. The ‘Academic Integrity: referencing and avoiding plagiarism’ online tutorial is a sophisticated learning tool that has reduced plagiarism and improved understanding of referencing, collusion and the consequences of academic misconduct. Technically the tutorial has an interesting interface design and is easy to navigate. Pedagogically the design incorporates relevant contexts which help learners to construct new knowledge from existing knowledge. It demonstrates new information and students learn by applying the new knowledge. It is self-paced and incorporates equity and diversity issues. Our three year evaluation program has indicated a significant decline in the incidence of plagiarism and enhanced understanding of good academic practices among our first year students. The tutorial has gained international recognition as an innovative computer-based learning tool. Peer Assisted Study Sessions (PASS) have been in place for six years and involve student leaders in hands-on peer mentoring of students in all of our large first year classes. PASS aims to build core academic skills and facilitate social learning and interaction and also to provide a network of support for students new to the university system. It has resulted in enhanced learning outcomes, with a strong correlation between PASS attendance and improved grades and retention rates. Student feedback indicated that the most effective facilitation approaches included worksheets, discussion, games and quizzes. Students also highlighted the important role that PASS played in easing their social transition into university life. PASS sessions provided a relaxed opportunity for students to meet and develop informal networks. External evaluation of PASS has led to the program gaining both institutional and national recognition

The System Kato: Detecting Cases of Plagiarism for Answer-Set Programs

Plagiarism detection is a growing need among educational institutions and solutions for different purposes exist. An important field in this direction is detecting cases of source-code plagiarism. In this paper, we present the tool Kato for supporting the detection of this kind of plagiarism in the area of answer-set programming (ASP). Currently, the tool is implemented for DLV programs but it is designed to handle other logic-programming dialects as well. We review the basic features of Kato, introduce its theoretical underpinnings, and discuss an application of Kato for plagiarism detection in the context of courses on logic programming at the Vienna University of Technology

Collaboration Versus Cheating

We outline how we detected programming plagiarism in an introductory online course for a master's of science in computer science program, how we achieved a statistically significant reduction in programming plagiarism by combining a clear explanation of university and class policy on academic honesty reinforced with a short but formal assessment, and how we evaluated plagiarism rates before SIGand after implementing our policy and assessment.Comment: 7 pages, 1 figure, 5 tables, SIGCSE 201

The Effectiveness of Low-Level Structure-based Approach Toward Source Code Plagiarism Level Taxonomy

Low-level approach is a novel way to detect source code plagiarism. Such approach is proven to be effective when compared to baseline approach (i.e., an approach which relies on source code token subsequence matching) in controlled environment. We evaluate the effectiveness of state of the art in low-level approach based on Faidhi \& Robinson's plagiarism level taxonomy; real plagiarism cases are employed as dataset in this work. Our evaluation shows that state of the art in low-level approach is effective to handle most plagiarism attacks. Further, it also outperforms its predecessor and baseline approach in most plagiarism levels.Comment: The 6th International Conference on Information and Communication Technolog

Plagiarism detection using information retrieval and similarity measures based on image processing techniques

This paper describes the Barcelona Media Innovation Center participation in the 2nd International Competition on Plagiarism Detection. Particularly, our system focused on the external plagiarism detection task, which assumes the source documents are available. We present a two-step a approach. In the first step of our method, we build an information retrieval system based on Solr/Lucene, segmenting both suspicious and source documents into smaller texts.We perform a search based on bag-of-words which provides a first selection of potentially plagiarized texts. In the second step, each promising pair is further investigated. We implemented a sliding window approach that computes cosine distances between overlapping text segments from both the source and suspicious documents on a pair wise basis. As a result, a similarity matrix between text segments is obtained, which is smoothed by means of low-pass 2-D filtering. From the smoothed similarity matrix, plagiarized segments are identified by using image processing techniques. Our results were placed in the middle of the official ranking, which considered together two types of plagiarism: intrinsic and external.Postprint (published version

Criminal intent or cognitive dissonance: how does student self plagiarism fit into academic integrity?

The discourse of plagiarism is speckled with punitive terms not out of place in a police officer's notes: detection, prevention, misconduct, rules, regulations, conventions, transgression, consequences, deter, trap, etc. This crime and punishment paradigm tends to be the norm in academic settings. The learning and teaching paradigm assumes that students are not filled with criminal intent, but rather are confused by the novel academic culture and its values. The discourse of learning and teaching includes: development, guidance, acknowledge, scholarly practice, communicate, familiarity, culture. Depending on the paradigm adopted, universities, teachers, and students will either focus on policies, punishments, and ways to cheat the system or on program design, assessments, and assimilating the values of academia. Self plagiarism is a pivotal issue that polarises these two paradigms. Viewed from a crime and punishment paradigm, self plagiarism is an intentional act of evading the required workload for a course by re-using previous work. Within a learning and teaching paradigm, self plagiarism is an oxymoron. We would like to explore the differences between these two paradigms by using self plagiarism as a focal point