Plagiarism in philosophy: prevention better than cure

[Introduction] Plagiarism more common than thought in student essays’ would make a good headline. Recent research suggests that students admit to much more plagiarism and other forms of cheating than teachers generally suspect, and it is widely believed that the problem is increasing as a result of the internet. The solution is to use a range of techniques to get the thought back into student essay writing, and to take more active steps to spot when this has not happened

Usefulness and reliability of online assessments: a Business Faculty's experience

The usefulness and reliability of online assessment results relate to the clarity, specificity and articulation of assessment purposes, goals and criteria. Cheating and plagiarism are two frequent and controversial issues that arise and there is a view that the online assessments mode inherently lends itself to both these practices. However, reconceptualising practice and redeveloping techniques can pave the way for an authentic assessment approach which minimizes student academic dishonesty. This article describes research which investigated online assessments practice in a business faculty at an Australian university and proposes what might constitute good, sustainable practice and design in university online assessment practices

Ethical and Unethical Methods of Plagiarism Prevention in Academic Writing

This paper discusses plagiarism origins, and the ethical solutions to prevent it. It also reviews some unethical approaches, which may be used to decrease the plagiarism rate in academic writings. We propose eight ethical techniques to avoid unconscious and accidental plagiarism in manuscripts without using online systems such as Turnitin and/or iThenticate for cross checking and plagiarism detection. The efficiency of the proposed techniques is evaluated on five different texts using students individually. After application of the techniques on the texts, they were checked by Turnitin to produce the plagiarism and similarity report. At the end, the “effective factor” of each method has been compared with each other; and the best result went to a hybrid combination of all techniques to avoid plagiarism. The hybrid of ethical methods decreased the plagiarism rate reported by Turnitin from nearly 100 to the average of 8.4 on 5 manuscripts

Staff attitudes to dealing with plagiarism issues: Perspectives from one Australian university

The author retains the copyright for this work, while granting the International Journal for Educational Integrity the exclusive right of first publication.This paper reports on the results of an online staff survey at one Australian university on attitudes to plagiarism issues, the use and efficacy of the institutional plagiarism policy and Turnitin system and staff perceptions of institutional resources that were available to assist both staff and students reduce the incidence of plagiarism. The survey was designed to capture staff perceptions, rather than verifiable activity or plagiarism detection outcomes. The survey responses highlighted the need for a common understanding of plagiarism and approaches to the detection and dealing with suspected plagiarism incidents. The responses also signalled a requirement for improved assessment practices that reduce the opportunity for plagiarism. Staff responses indicated that there was a need to publicise more effectively existing University resources for avoiding plagiarism; only a minority of survey respondents were aware of these resources. The majority of staff perceived that the institutional policies and practices were adequate for dealing with suspected plagiarism incidents.Geoffrey T Cris

TF-IDF Inspired Detection for Cross-Language Source Code Plagiarism and Collusion

Several computing courses allow students to choose which programming language they want to use for completing a programming task. This can lead to cross-language code plagiarism and collusion, in which the copied code file is rewritten in another programming language. In response to that, this paper proposes a detection technique which is able to accurately compare code files written in various programming languages, but with limited effort in accommodating such languages at development stage. The only language-dependent feature used in the technique is source code tokeniser and no code conversion is applied. The impact of coincidental similarity is reduced by applying a TF-IDF inspired weighting, in which rare matches are prioritised. Our evaluation shows that the technique outperforms common techniques in academia for handling language conversion disguises. Further, it is comparable to those techniques when dealing with conventional disguises

EFL teachers’ use of plagiarism detection software: A usability study

EFL teachers sometimes struggle harder to prevent their students’ committing plagiarism because the students’ limited EFL proficiency could be a cause of plagiarism. To prevent plagiarism, one of the methods widely employed is the use of plagiarism detection software such as Plagiarism Checker X. To assess how useful, easy to learn, easy to use, and satisfying the software was for them, 30 EFL teachers took anonymously an online 30-item questionnaire of 7-point Likert scale after they had downloaded and run a free version of the software. High mean agreement ratings across the four dimensions were revealed as 28 items were highly positively perceived between 6 (agree) and 7 (strongly agree) and two items were rated between 5 (slightly agree) and 6 (agree). The study showed that the software was useful for checking similarities between texts, easy to learn and use and could satisfy the teachers. They could arm themselves with the software to prevent plagiarism. As one of the first attempts to evaluate the usability of text-matching software from the EFL teachers’ perspective, this study has research and educational implications as it highlights avenues for preventing plagiarism via the software usability evaluation.