Plagiarism : proactive prevention instead of reactive punishment

Purpose - This study investigated whether providing university students with extra feedback regarding their referencing improves their referencing confidence and reduces their propensity to plagiarise. The study also sought to increase our understanding of what factors underlie student plagiarism.

Design/methodology/approach - Undergraduate and post-graduate accounting students were surveyed regarding their experience when completing a formative essay designed to give feedback on their referencing ability. All students in one undergraduate and one postgraduate accounting course were invited to participate in a post-assessment, electronically administered survey consisting of sixteen question.

Findings - The results indicate that a considerable number of the students perceived the formative assessment to be of benefit with respect to improving their referencing confidence. A significant proportion of the students indicated that their understanding of what constitutes plagiarism and their confidence in avoiding plagiarism improved as a result of the assessment and its associated feedback.

Research limitations/implications - This study supports the provision of assessment designed to assist students with improving their ability to both recognise and avoid plagiarism in their written work. However, this research has not investigated whether these types of exercises lead to an actual reduction in the incidence of plagiarism in tertiary student cohorts. This is an area for future research.

Skills training to avoid inadvertent plagiarism: results from a randomised control study

Plagiarism continues to be a concern within academic institutions. The current study utilised a randomised control trial of 137 new entry tertiary students to assess the efficacy of a scalable short training session on paraphrasing, patch writing and plagiarism. The results indicate that the training significantly enhanced students' overall knowledge about in-text referencing protocols. Importantly, this knowledge was found to translate into applied skills, with the intervention group performing significantly better in a practical skills application task. Moreover, the findings suggest that it is confidence in writing in English, not language background per se, which plays a significant role in students' practical skills in referencing and their confidence in performing assignment preparation tasks that can help them avoid claims of inadvertent plagiarism.

October 2002: Righting Writing; Web Sites Offer Help in Combating Digital Plagiarism

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A Virtual Programming Lab for Moodle with automatic assessment and anti-plagiarism features

[EN] This paper describes VPL, a Virtual Programming Lab module for Moodle, developed at the University of Las Palmas of Gran Canaria (ULPGC) and released for free uses under GNU/GPL license. For the students, it is a simple development environment with auto evaluation capabilities. For the instructors, it is a students' work management system, with features to facilitate the preparation of assignments, manage the submissions, check for plagiarism, and do assessments with the aid of powerful and flexible assessment tools based on program testing, all of that being independent of the programming language used for the assignments and taken into account critical security issues.

Hybrid system for plagiarism detection

The Internet boom in recent years has increased the interest in the field of plagiarism detection. A lot of documents are published on the Net everyday and anyone can access and plagiarize them. Of course, checking all cases of plagiarism manually is an unfeasible task. Therefore, it is necessary to create new systems that are able to automatically detect cases of plagiarism produced. In this paper, we introduce a new hybrid system for plagiarism detection which combines the advantages of the two main plagiarism detection techniques. This system consists of two analysis phases: the first phase uses an intrinsic detection technique which dismisses much of the text, and the second phase employs an external detection technique to identify the plagiarized text sections. With this combination we achieve a detection system which obtains accurate results and is also faster thanks to the prefiltering of the text.