EDUCATING ABOUT ACADEMIC MISCONDUCT

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EDUCATING ABOUT ACADEMIC MISCONDUCT Fintan
Culwin School of Computing London South Bank
University London SE1 0AA fintan_at_sbu.ac.uk
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It cannot be assumed that students new to HE are
aware of what constitutes academic misconduct
and why some practices are unacceptable.
Hence educating about academic misconduct needs
to be included in the first year curriculum.
Active involvement in the educative process is
preferable to being passively instructed in the
intricacies of academic regulations.
This activity formed part of a professional
skills unit taken by all first year computing
BIT students at SBU in autumn 2002.
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Culwin Naylor, Pragmatic Anti-Plagiarism 3rd
Annual Conference on the Teaching of
Computing, Dublin, August 1995, pp 61-66
An anti-plagiarism policy must have a number of
components. The first is a clear indication to
students of what constitutes plagiarism.
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A guest lecture on the history of computing
If my washing machine could talk to my fridge,
what might it say?
Led to a Web research activity
You have to research a term from the history of
computing and write an article about it . . .
The article will be published on a Web page for
other students to read. Although you are being
encouraged to use the Web to search for
information you MUST consult several sources of
information and the article you submit MUST be
entirely in your own words drawing only facts
and ideas from your sources.
Each student was given a unique term.
Illustrating individualised assignment setting
and so removing the possibility of
intra-corporal plagiarism.
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Each of approx. 150 submissions was subject to
automated originality checking using OrCheck
technology and an originality report produced
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An OrCheck visualisation is an extended VAST
visualisation allowing the intersection of a
number of documents to be shown.
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The reports were discussed with the students in a
non- punitive manner and a guest lecture on A.M.
followed.
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First Year Professional Skills Non-Originality
(n155)
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Final Year Project 2003, non-Originality (n318)
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These are low-water mark measures not all
plagiarised material will be located by any
(automated or non-automated) process.
the quantitative measure is conservative. the
first year measurement is non-cumulative. However
the shape of the high-water mark curve can be
expected to follow the shapes of these curves.
Leading to the conclusion Most students
are mostly honest most of the time, but a
small minority are very dishonest.
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Students were required to submit two URLs where
more information could be obtained. 53
students provided a URL which contributed more
than 10 of their submission. 8 students
provided a URL which contributed more than
50 of their submission. The difference between
these figures and the detected figures, 93 and
19 respectively, is a measure of the extent to
which deception was attempted.
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First Year Professional Skills First Year
Software Development
Spearman rank order correlation n24, rs0.937,
df22, t12.62, plt0.00001
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This is an example of actively educating students
about academic misconduct, which seems
applicable to other subject areas.
This is (one of?) the first UK qualitative study
on the extent of academic misconduct in a
student population.
Most students are mostly honest most of the time
. . .
. . . but a small minority are very dishonest.
There is some suggestion that cheating is an
individual trait.
Some students are so secure in their behaviour
that they provide the source of the material
that they have used.