PeterSmith.Org

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.


    Webmentions
    If you webmention this page, please let me know the URL of your page.

    BTW: Your webmention won't show up until I next "build" my site.

    Word count: 300 (about 2 minutes)

    Published:

    Updated: 8 Apr '04 13:05

    Author: Peter Smith

    Permalink: https://petersmith.org/blog/2004/04/08/the-ugly/

    Section: blog

    Kind: page

    Bundle type: leaf

    Source: blog/2004/04/08/the-ugly/index.org