A big concern amongst the academic community is how an increase in the use of learning technologies will increase instances of plagiarism. It’s true that with digital files, copying another student’s work is easier… with search engines like Google, copying from an online source is a fairly simple way of avoiding doing the work themselves.

Software such as Turnitin will help identify instances like these, and in our institution, many are turning to electronic submission of essays precisely to detect plagiarism. However, a bigger question that is being addressed more recently, is whether we’ve got the balance right… should we be working to detect plagiarism, or avoid it?

Avoiding plagiarism, I believe is down to doing two things…

1. Designing assessments so it’s difficult to cheat
2. Educating your students about handling sources and academic honesty

Design

The following tips are taken from the JISC Plagiarism Advisory Service (www.jiscpas.ac.uk)

• Change your assignments: Don’t set the same assessments year on year – it’s natural that students will talk to each other and this is easy to spot
• Focus on analytical skills in the assessment criteria: Avoid setting assignments that ask students to simply explain or describe their knowledge. More analytical or creative tasks are less likely to exist in essay banks – make sure these skills are rewarded in the assessment criteria
• Create Personalised tasks: it is near impossible to cheat if the question asks you to apply your knowledge to your own context
• Build up your assessments: design assessments that build on a student’s previous submissions

Educating Students

Students need to know about what constitutes plagiarism, and it is best to educate them about this as early as possible to encourage good writing skills. Here are a few ideas you might try:

• Encourage students to keep annotated bibliographies so they get used to handling sources correctly
• Run activities to help students distinguish between
• Collect drafts as students go along