Plagiarism Detection Avoidance Methods and Countermeasures

Plagiarism is a major problem that educators face in the information age. Today\u27s plagiarist has a near limitless supply of well-written articles via the internet. Due to the scale of the problem, detecting plagiarism has now become the domain of the computer scientist rather than the educator. With the use of computers, documents can be conveniently scanned into a plagiarism detection system that references public web pages, academic journals, and even previous students\u27 papers, acting as an all-seeing eye. However, plagiarists can overcome these digital content detection systems with the use of clever masking and substitutions techniques. These systems cost universities tens of thousands of dollars, and also infringe upon intellectual property ownership rights without the informed consent of individual students. In this work, we examine the efficacy of commercial plagiarism detection systems when used against some selected masking techniques, and then present a simple countermeasure to combat the aforementioned detection avoidance technique

Issues of quality assurance in the management of plagiarism in blended learning environments

Increasing access to and availability of electronic resources presents students with a rich library of opportunities for independent study. But students also find themselves in the confusing territory of how they should best use these resources within their assessment activities. Likewise, teaching institutions are faced with the problems of plagiarism and collusion, and the challenges of educating, deterring, detecting, and dealing with breaches of policy in a fair and consistent way across all disciplines. This paper examines issues of quality assurance in the management of plagiarism by discussing the following questions: – How can effective automated plagiarism detection services be introduced and managed across the institution? – What teaching and assessment practices can be adopted to deter plagiarism? – What part should collusion and plagiarism detection tools play in educating and deterring students? – What are appropriate penalties for plagiarism and collusion and how can these be applied consistently across disciplines? Drawing together three distinct strands of research, in both distance and campus based institutions, the authors discuss how practice and policy have evolved in recent years in an attempt to reduce the incidence of plagiarism and collusion. The paper will illustrate this evolution by reporting on recent developments in assessment strategy, detection tools, and policy within two UK HE Institutions: The UK Open University and Manchester Metropolitan University

Plagiarism and new media technologies: Combating 'cut 'n paste' culture

Whilst plagiarism has been around since pen was put to paper, the inextricable relationship that education now enjoys with new media technologies has seen its incidence increase to epidemic proportions. Plagiarism has become a blight on tertiary education, insidiously degrading the quality of degrees, largely thanks to ICTs providing students with ways to seamlessly misappropriate information. Many students are increasingly unsure how to avoid it and are being overseen by educators that cannot agree on what exactly constitutes academic dishonesty and how it should be effectively handled. This paper analyses the issues facing students and academics in light of new media in education and increasing moves to online learning. It considers the issues aggravating the problem; rising financial pressures, ambiguous cultural practices, practices in high school education; and seeks to provide a starting point for consistent, pedagogically sound approaches to the problem

e-Authentication for online assessment: A mixed-method study

Authenticating the students’ identity and authenticity of their work is increasingly important to reduce academic malpractices and for quality assurance purposes in Education. There is a growing body of research about technological innovations to combat cheating and plagiarism. However, the literature is very limited on the impact of e-authentication systems across distinctive end-users because it is not a widespread practice at the moment. A considerable gap is to understand whether the use of e-authentication systems would increase trust on e-assessment, and to extend, whether students’ acceptance would vary across gender, age and previous experiences. This study aims to shed light on this area by examining the attitudes and experiences of 328 students who used an authentication system known as adaptive trust-based e-assessment system for learning (TeSLA). Evidence from mixed-method analysis suggests a broadly positive acceptance of these e-authentication technologies by distance education students. However, significant differences in the students’ responses indicated, for instance, that men were less concerned about providing personal data than women; middle-aged participants were more aware of the nuances of cheating and plagiarism;while younger students were more likely to reject e-authentication, considerably due to data privacy and security and students with disabilities due to concerns about their special needs

Cryptographic Methods with a Pli Cachete: Towards the Computational Assurance of Integrity

Unreproducibility stemming from a loss of data integrity can be prevented with hash functions, secure sketches, and Benford's Law when combined with the historical practice of a Pli Cacheté where scientific discoveries were archived with a 3rd party to later prove the date of discovery. Including the distinct systems of preregistation and data provenance tracking becomes the starting point for the creation of a complete ontology of scientific documentation. The ultimate goals in such a system--ideally mandated--would rule out several forms of dishonesty, catch computational and database errors, catch honest mistakes, and allow for automated data audits of large collaborative open science projects

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

Quality Assessment for E-learning: a Benchmarking Approach (Third edition)

The primary purpose of this manual is to provide a set of benchmarks, quality criteria and notes for guidance against which e-learning programmes and their support systems may be judged. The manual should therefore be seen primarily as a reference tool for the assessment or review of e-learning programmes and the systems which support them. However, the manual should also prove to be useful to staff in institutions concerned with the design, development, teaching, assessment and support of e-learning programmes. It is hoped that course developers, teachers and other stakeholders will see the manual as a useful development and/or improvement tool for incorporation in their own institutional systems of monitoring, evaluation and enhancement

Secrecy in Educational Practices: Enacting Nested Black Boxes in Cheating and Deception Detection Systems

This paper covers secrecy from the vantage point of recent technological initiatives designed to detect cheating and deception in educational contexts as well as to monitor off-campus social media speech code violations. Many of these systems are developed and implemented by third-party corporate entities who claim practices to be proprietary and secret. The outsourcers involved in these efforts have provided one level of secrecy and educational administrators involved yet another level, thus constructing nested black boxes. Also discussed in this paper is the “paranoid style” of administration, often supported by the surveillance and construction of rosters of potential non-conformists, such as alleged cheaters and speech code violators. The educational technologies described in this article are increasingly applied to workplace practices, with young people being trained in what is deemed acceptable conduct. Secrecy can serve to alter the character of relationships within the educational institutions involved as well as inside the workplaces in which the approaches are increasingly being integrated

Pedagogical approaches for e-assessment with authentication and authorship verification in Higher Education

Checking the identity of students and authorship of their online submissions is a major concern in Higher Education due to the increasing amount of plagiarism and cheating using the Internet. The literature on the effects of e-authentication systems for teaching staff is very limited because it is a novel procedure for them. A considerable gap is to understand teaching staff’ views regarding the use of e-authentication instruments and how they impact trust in e-assessment. This mixed-method study examines the concerns and practices of 108 teaching staff who used the TeSLA - Adaptive Trust-based e-Assessment System in six countries: UK, Spain, Netherlands, Bulgaria, Finland and Turkey. The findings revealed some technological, organisational and pedagogical issues related to accessibility, security, privacy and e-assessment design and feedback. Recommendations are to provide: a FAQ and an audit report with results, to raise awareness about data security and privacy, to develop policies and guidelines about fraud detection and prevention, e-assessment best practices and course team support

Generative Artificial Intelligence in Higher Education: Evidence from an Analysis of Institutional Policies and Guidelines

The release of ChatGPT in November 2022 prompted a massive uptake of generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) across higher education institutions (HEIs). HEIs scrambled to respond to its use, especially by students, looking first to regulate it and then arguing for its productive integration within teaching and learning. In the year since the release, HEIs have increasingly provided policies and guidelines to direct GenAI. In this paper we examined documents produced by 116 US universities categorized as high research activity or R1 institutions to comprehensively understand GenAI related advice and guidance given to institutional stakeholders. Through an extensive analysis, we found the majority of universities (N=73, 63%) encourage the use of GenAI and many provide detailed guidance for its use in the classroom (N=48, 41%). More than half of all institutions provided sample syllabi (N=65, 56%) and half (N=58, 50%) provided sample GenAI curriculum and activities that would help instructors integrate and leverage GenAI in their classroom. Notably, most guidance for activities focused on writing, whereas code and STEM-related activities were mentioned half the time and vaguely even when they were (N=58, 50%). Finally, more than one half of institutions talked about the ethics of GenAI on a range of topics broadly, including Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) (N=60, 52%). Overall, based on our findings we caution that guidance for faculty can become burdensome as extensive revision of pedagogical approaches is often recommended in the policies