Attitude to plagiarism in different European countries
Plagiarism is an important and frequently discussed issue, which may have severe financial impacts for higher education institutions across Europe. However, there are different attitudes to this topic in different countries. Whereas ECTS aims to provide an objective measurement of student effort allowing students to spend part of their studies at different institutions and even different countries, the penalties for plagiarism and other types of cheating may be different. Even the definition of plagiarism may be understood differently in particular European countries. One of the aims of the project IPPHEAE is to identify these differences and try to find common solutions for related problems.The aim of the paper is to present results of research focused on attitudes to plagiarism in Great Britain, Czech Republic, Poland, Lithuania, Cyprus and Bulgaria. A questionnaire survey was conducted in these countries among students and teachers. The results are interesting and inspiring and show huge differences in attitude to plagiarism between western and post-communist countries, surprisingly including the Czech Republic in the group of western countries.
Impact of Policies for Plagiarism in Higher Education Across Europe: Results of the Project
Exploring policies and systems for assuring academic integrity and deterring plagiarism in different higher education institutions was the subject of a three-year project funded by the European Union (EU). The research for Impact of Policies for Plagiarism in Higher Education Across Europe (IPPHEAE), completed in November 2013, was conducted by teams at five higher education institutions from UK, Poland, Lithuania, Cyprus and Czech Republic. The research included an EU-wide survey of higher education institutions across 27 EU member states. Separate reports were prepared for the countries surveyed, each containing details of findings and recommendations for what could and should be done to improve academic quality and integrity at national, institutional and individual levels. An EU-wide comparative study provided an assessment of the maturity of policies and processes for academic integrity in each country, based on the data collected and the research conducted for each national report.This paper presents selected comparisons of results from the research, especially looking at evidence for maturity of policies, consistency of approach, examples of good practice and highlighting where serious effort is needed to strengthen current policies and practices.
DIFFERENTIAL CALCULUS OF SEVERAL VARIABLES WITH MATHEMATICA OR MAPLE
The use of Computer Algebra Systems (CAS) in Mathematical Laboratories at Engineering Schools is increasing. Therefore, it has become necessary to undertake a new educational approach in the teaching of many mathematical topics. Obviously it is not possible to give the same lectures as in the 1950,s. The CAS allows us to experiment and teach in “a different way”. The students' mathematical knowledge at the beginning of their studies in the University is completely different. Moreover we have fewer credits assigned to Mathematical topics in engineering curriculum. The objective of he authors, professors of different Spanish Universities, is to try to demonstrate a new way to use the CAS, concretely Maple and Mathematica, as a support in the teaching of Differential Calculus of Several Variables. They take advantage of the computer's graphical capacities to sketch the graphs of surfaces defined in explicit, parametric or implicit form. They survey the general topics: limits, partial derivatives, differentiability, chain rule, implicit functions and extreme values. For each topic, they give a few basic instructions of the CAS used; afterwards they give several examples, in increasing order of difficulty, and finally the students must solve exercises and try to establish a general procedure for a quite general problem. In this paper we have included several examples used in this survey.