Assignments / Assessments and Plagiarism
You may find that your process for assigning, receiving, marking and returning student work will now be done entirely through an online system, whether integrated with your online learning environment or sitting separately. If you're used to swapping assignment instructions for submitted work either by hand on paper or even through email, this will be a big change and you'll have to get up to speed on the way the system works.
There is also the likelihood that the assignment system will have integrated into it the ability to detect plagiarism.
Plagiarism Detection and Text Matching
Plagiarism is the use of someone else's words or ideas without attribution, as if they were your own. With the advent of the internet, the opportunity to easily copy from millions of sources and paste chunks of text into one's own work has pushed the problem of plagiarism to alarming heights.
Not surprisingly, digital tools that automatically check submitted work for possible plagiarism have been developed. While not foolproof, tools like Turnitin are helpful in identifying similarities with other sources and deterring students from the temptation to cheat.
That said, no plagiarism detection tool will be able to catch papers written by professional academic "paper mills", where students can pay to have a researcher write a paper for them on the assigned topic. That is a problem that has to be tackled at institutional, national and international level. If you do suspect an assignment isn't a student's own work -- even though it passes plagiarism detection -- contact your institutional office governing plagiarism and student conduct.
Further reading:
- Supporting academic integrity: approaches and resources for higher education
- Means, Motive, Opportunity: A Composite Narrative about Academic Misconduct
Tools
Turnitin is the leading originality checking and plagiarism prevention service used by millions of students and staff, and thousands of institutions worldwide. Turnitin scans a range of academic databases, including a large database of previously submitted essays, books, journals and the internet. Your institution may have Turnitin integrated with your online learning environment, allowing it to operate on every assignment your students submit. Turnitin also provides an easy place to organise, record, mark and comment on student assignments.
If your institution doesn't have Turnitin or other integrated tool or if you want to be able to do quick checks on your own outside of your system, there are many free detection tools available. Here is a list from elearning Industry:
Benefits for students
It's not all punitive! There are interesting and useful reasons to be alert to plagiarism and vigilant about avoiding it. Tools can provide benefits that actually aid research by bringing up additional sources for exploring.
[Link to institutional information about plagiarism]
Exams
How to manage exams online with remote students has become a major issue, and the Covid-19 outbreak accelerated the trend. Hiring exam centre and invigilators to serve students around the globe is just not sustainable for many institutions, but the problem of avoiding cheating and false identity (that the person who takes the exam is in fact the student enrolled on the course) has not yet been sufficiently solved by technology. On the other hand, with the fast rise of AI, some institutions are going back to traditional methods. This is a fast-changing area, and you will always need to follow your institution's lead.
