Cheating in academia is associated with future cheating in 'real life'

Graphic created by: Online Masters Degree

Re-posted by Peter Mellalieu

At Unitec, I follow these practices in my first-year teaching:

• Provide students with a template ‘scaffold’ that demonstrates good practice in writing a Formal Executive Report
• Distribute Unitec’s written policy explaining what constitutes academic dishonesty
• Verbally refer to the policy in class
• Utilise Turnitin.com for all assignment at risk of dishonest practice. (Turnitin is an anti-cheating technology)
• Refuse to grade assignments until they have been submitted to to Turnitin
• Provide students with practice uploading a draft assignment to Turnitin, and reporting to them the result from Turnitin
• Alerting students with high ‘practice’ Turnitin scores that they have a problem. I guide them to sources of advice for correct referencing, citation, quotation, and paraphrasing.
• Prosecute vigorously those students found to be copying material dishonestly.

This approach appears to have reduced the degree of blatant assignment copying in my class from 6 out of 40 students to 1 out of 40 students in my most recent semester.

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• New Studies Show Technology to Blame for Increase in Plagiarism (drdianehamilton.wordpress.com)
• Turnitin’s Different Messages To Students, Teachers (news.slashdot.org)
• Dalhousie cancels anti-plagiarism site contract (cbc.ca)
• The Effectiveness of Plagiarism Detection Software (schneier.com)
• Promoting an Ethical School Culture (usnews.com)
• Plagiarism Checkers (digiteacher.wordpress.com)
• Allison’s Space 09/09/2011 (allisonkipta.wordpress.com)