J. Zobel and M. Hamilton
Some students cheat. They take material from the web, pay for assignment solutions, steal floppy disks, copy over shoulders, transcribe passages of text from library books, barter essays, or simply work too closely with their friends. Cheating, and particularly plagiarism - in this context, the inclusion of someone else's work in an assignment without acknowledgement - is hardly a new phenomenon, but in modern universities it is exceedingly common. (Marsden 2001) The forms of cheating vary between disciplines, and are changing rapidly with the growth of the internet. In the humanities, the web's vast quantities of text on virtually any topic make it a simple task for a student to stitch together an essay from borrowed material. In our discipline, computer science, the web is a ready source of programs for solving virtually any undergraduate task. In addition, facilities such as email, file copying, and editors can be used by students to share work.
Our school is large, and there is plenty of evidence that plagiarism was widespread. One disturbing aspect of the issue is that staff were well aware that some students were plagiarising, but many staff felt that the problem was insuperable, while others felt that discipline was inappropriate. Another issue is the occasional feedback from capable students, in particular mature students, that they are embittered by an apparent acceptance of the culture of cheating. With the possibility - arguably, certainty - that some students were completing their degrees with little competence in the subject material, we decided to act decisively, and take all reasonable steps to eliminate plagiarism.
In taking action, several factors were considered. First, as attractive as it might be to make an example of the next batch of students we caught, it would be unreasonable to dramatically escalate the consequences of plagiarism without full warning. Many of the students, notably those from other cultures (around half of our students are international), do not share our definition of plagiarism. Second, the problem may have grown at least partly because of higher academic loads - simply imposing further expectations on busy teaching staff would not succeed. Third, discussions with staff revealed that in important respects they were inadequately prepared to manage plagiarism detection, so development of workable processes became an important aspect of the project. Indeed, a central lesson is that detecting the instances of plagiarism is only one aspect of the problem.
Introducing rigorous systems for detecting and penalising plagiarism had the immediate effect that a large number of cheating students were identified and interviewed. These interviews, together with information from student advisors and rights officers, allowed us to draw a range of observations on the causes of plagiarism, and helped us to refine our approaches to reducing its incidence.
One longer-term consequence of our actions has been a significant reduction in the number of students caught cheating. Another has been positive feedback from students who were at university to study and learn, were competing for marks with dishonest peers, and felt impotent in the presence of conspicuous abuse of the system. While it is not pleasant to investigate students, gather evidence, and institute disciplinary proceedings, overall the project has been beneficial.