The Ugly
I subscribe to the the JIS Plagiarism mailing list and a couple of interesting articles can be found there.
In the first The Journal of E-Learning has an article called Plagiarism and Poor Academic Practice? A Threat to the Extension of e-Learning in Higher Education which provides some interesting facts on the size of the problem.
According to the article, in the UK:
… Franklyn-Stokes and Newstead (1995) and Newstead et.al. (1996) have attempted to ascertain the frequencies of a range of non-academic practices. Students were asked to report whether they had engaged in a range of behaviour at least once in the previous academic year.
And their table looked like this (allowing for translation between mediums) table.
Behaviour | Percentage |
---|---|
reporting | |
behaviour | |
Paraphrasing material from another source without acknowledging | |
the author | 54 |
Inventing data | 48 |
Allowing coursework to be copied by another student | 46 |
Copying material for coursework from a book or other publication | |
without acknowledging the source | 42 |
Copying another student's coursework with their knowledge | 36 |
Doing another student?s coursework for them | 16 |
Copying from a neighbour during an exam without them realising | 13 |
Anyway it makes interesting reading. Another thing that is interesting to read is the The Plagiarism Blog. For example, one of the stories on the Blog talks about a Canadian university that has given up using take home essays as a form of assessment as an means to counter, what they see, as increased plagiarism.
I watch with curiosity what will happen.