Policy, Preparation, and Prevention: Proactive minimization of student plagiarism
Countless cases of plagiarism are detected across the Australian higher education sector each year. Generally speaking, policy and other responses to the issue focus on punitive, rather than on educative, measures. Recently, a subtle shift is discernable. As well as ensuring appropriate consequences for plagiarists, several universities are beginning to formalize the inclusion of learning and teaching strategies in anti‐plagiarism‐related policy and practice, as well as paying closer attention to the communication of unambiguous definitions of plagiarism. This article outlines one example of the emerging educative approach and details the ways in which this approach has been implemented across an entire university. The necessity of evidence‐based evaluation of approaches to reducing plagiarism in higher education is discussed.
Plagiarism in five universities in Mozambique: Magnitude, detection techniques, and control measures
Hugely facilitated by the Internet, plagiarism by students threatens educational quality and professional ethics worldwide. Plagiarism reduces learning and is correlated with increased fraud and inefficiency on the job, thus lessening competitiveness and hampering development.In this context, the present research examines 48 licenciatura theses and 102 masters theses from five of Mozambique’s largest universities. Of the 150 theses, 75% contained significant plagiarism (>100 word equivalents) and 39%, very much (>500 word equivalents). Significant plagiarism was detected in both licenciatura and masters theses. By using both Turnitin and Urkund to identify potentially plagiarized passages, professionally verifying whether those passages contain plagiarism, and, if confirmed, counting the words involved, the study presents a new method for classifying the quantity and significance of plagiarism. The use of two text-similarity-recognition programs also improved the rate of detection and, in some theses, significantly increased the classification of the gravity of the plagiarism encountered.Based on a broad review of the literature, the article argues that, to combat wide-scale plagiarism, academic institutions need to cultivate a consensus among faculty and students about the definition and types of plagiarism, the appropriate penalties, and the paramount professional and economic need to nurture professional ethics. However, to achieve even partial success requires significant involvement by administrators, faculty, students and student leaders guided by a holistic strategy using technological, pedagogical, administrative and legal components to prevent and detect plagiarism and then reeducate or discipline students caught plagiarizing.
Viewpoint: Applying an Employee-Motivation Model to Prevent Student Plagiarism
Abstract A new, management-oriented model for the prevention of student plagiarism is described. The model, which was derived from Vroom's expectancy theory of employee motivation, postulates that instructors can best prevent plagiarism by ensuring that students (a) understand the rules of ethical writing, (b) expect the writing assignment to be manageable, (c) expect ethical writing to lead to personally important benefits, (d) expect plagiarizing to be difficult, and (e) expect plagiarizing to lead to personally important costs. Included are descriptions of many specific strategies for each part of the model.