Substantive editing as a form of plagiarism among postgraduate students in Australia

In university plagiarism policies, and in the research into plagiarism, one form of collusion remains virtually unacknowledged: substantive editing performed by editors. While almost all Australian universities allow postgraduate students to have their thesis professionally edited, substantive editing is prohibited. This article discusses the problems inherent in this arrangement, given that most students and supervisors, and some editors, are not clear on where the line is between the two. Moreover, it is evident that there are a myriad of social and economic pressures that lead to substantive editing being performed even when all three parties are aware that it is occurring. Substantive editing is a particularly insidious form of plagiarism since it has received so little attention by universities, it is seen as less serious than other forms of plagiarism, it requires high levels of vigilance to detect and there are no deterrents in place. This article argues that there are significant numbers of students engaging in this form of plagiarism. This study aims to shed light on this issue by examining the nature, motivations behind and prevalence of substantive editing, while recognising the social context and negative effects of the issue.     

How to correct teaching methods that favour plagiarism: recommendations from teachers and students in a Spanish language distance education university

The presentation of the intellectual work of others as their own by students is believed to be common worldwide. Punishments and detection software have failed to solve the problem and have important limitations themselves. To go to the root of the problem, we applied an online questionnaire to 344 university students and their 13 teachers. Our objective was to compare their views on plagiarism and to test nine hypotheses about causation. We found that both students and teachers know what plagiarism is and that each group blames itself to some extent. Students blamed their own attitude but also mentioned their need to cope with an unnecessarily heavy workload imposed by teachers. Teachers blamed impunity and their own failure in providing meaningful and creative student work. Only 8% of the students admitted to plagiarising contents and admission was independent of need for higher scores, years in the university, sex, age, occupation, career or living in a small city where educational resources are more limited. We found that Spanish language literature has given more attention to the students’ point of view than much of its English counterparts, and conclude that plagiarism can be prevented by an approach based mainly on a workload defined by teacher teams instead of isolated teachers; reduction of rote learning (associated with texts that are easy to copy and paste); assignment of individualised work that cannot be plagiarised (workshops, exhibitions, forums, portfolios, solving real cases, applying concepts to the student’s personal experience); and accompanying students along the whole process of producing the written work.     

Academic integrity and plagiarism: a review of the influences and risk situations for health students

Health professions are increasingly focusing on the development of integrity and professionalism in students of Health disciplines. While it is expected that Health students will develop, and commit to, the highest standards of conduct as undergraduates, and henceforth through their careers, the pressures of assessment and external commitments may lead to both unintentional and intentional plagiaristic behaviours. Exponential growth in Internet resources and new information technologies, as well as individual belief systems or naivety about the authorship attribution convention, suggest complexity in understanding the risks and factors associated with academic plagiarism. This paper reviews the education literature to provide an insight for academics into reasons for student plagiarism and, where possible, management of these risks. Our review refers to the health professions as a discipline in which academic conduct in students should be at the highest possible standard.     

Turnitoff: identifying and fixing a hole in current plagiarism detection software

In recent times, plagiarism detection software has become popular in universities and colleges, in an attempt to stem the tide of plagiarised student coursework. Such software attempts to detect any copied material and identify its source. The most popular such software is Turnitin, a commercial system used by thousands of institutions in more than 100 countries. Here, we show how to fix a loophole in Turnitin's current plagiarism detection process. We demonstrate that, in its current incarnation, one can easily create a document that passes the plagiarism check regardless of how much copied material it contains; we then show how to improve the system to avoid such attacks.     

Academic staff's perspectives upon student plagiarism: a case study at a university in Hong Kong

Much of the previous research concerning student plagiarism has been conducted in Anglo-American settings. The present paper reports a case study of academic staff's perspectives upon student plagiarism at a university in Hong Kong. Based on interviews with 16 instructors, the study focused on the teachers' views and pedagogical practices, including their use of Turnitin. The paper ends by noting certain areas that need to be addressed in tackling student plagiarism and by proposing a few lines of future research.     

Evaluation of an intervention to help students avoid unintentional plagiarism by improving their authorial identity

Students with poorly developed authorial identity may be at risk of unintentional plagiarism. An instructional intervention designed specifically to improve authorial identity was delivered to 364 psychology students at three post‐1992 universities in London, UK, and evaluated with before‐and‐after measures of beliefs and attitudes about academic authorship, using the Student Authorship Questionnaire. Changes in questionnaire scores showed that the intervention led to significantly increased confidence in writing, understanding of authorship, knowledge to avoid plagiarism, and top‐down approaches to writing, and significantly decreased bottom‐up and pragmatic approaches to writing. For understanding of authorship, knowledge to avoid plagiarism and pragmatic approaches to writing, significant intervention by year of study interaction effects showed that the greatest improvements were among year one undergraduates. Direct evaluative feedback showed that 86% of students believed the intervention helped them avoid plagiarism and 66% believed it helped them write better assignments. Post‐intervention focus groups revealed changed student understandings about authorial identity and academic writing. The results show that interventions can help students avoid unintentional plagiarism by adopting more authorial roles in their academic writing. Further research could explore other influences on authorial identity, and examine the impact of authorial identity interventions on other outcome indicators.     

Student plagiarism in higher education in Vietnam: an empirical study

This paper assesses and compares the prevalence of plagiarism across different student and assignment characteristics at a university in Vietnam, using the similarity index reported by the text-matching software Turnitin as a proxy measure of plagiarism on a sample of 681 student papers. The findings present a level of match higher than reported in earlier studies at universities outside of Vietnam, with an average similarity index of 29.06%. Controlling for the gender and major of the students, the extent of plagiarism is implied to be negatively correlated with the students’ academic performances and with the likelihood of being caught, and positively correlated with the length of the assignments. Thus, this study, relying on actual text-matching data rather than self-reported surveys, provides the first empirical test of two theoretical plagiarism models proposed in the literature. The explanatory factors confirmed by this study illustrate the potential benefits of the use of software tools to detect plagiarism and can help refine academic integrity policy formulations for universities.     

Addressing plagiarism in online programmes at a health sciences university: a case study

Plagiarism continues to be a concern for all educational institutions. To build a solid foundation for high academic standards and best practices at a graduate university, aspects of plagiarism were reviewed to develop better management processes for reducing plagiarism. Specifically, the prevalence of plagiarism and software programmes for detecting plagiarism was investigated. From that information, best practices for responding to plagiarism were developed and a process to enhance academic integrity was instituted. The results were impressive, the incidence of plagiarism offences reduced by half in three years, and by 75% among the English as a second-language student population.     

Conceptualising plagiarism: using Lego to construct students' understanding of authorship and citation

The transition from further to higher education is marked by a series of challenges for the new student, not least the requirement to learn the discourse of academic practice, and referencing as a part of that. By perceiving what it means to reference, students should also come to understand what it means to write, including the problematic areas of authorship and ownership of ideas. Academic writing and paraphrasing are demanding concepts that require the student writer to enter into the academic discourse and relinquish their hold on the worlds of a text and embrace instead the argument behind them, in a form of ‘language-game’. Taking an interpretative, dialogic approach to referencing, the inherent playfulness of learning is emphasised through the use of Lego, used as a metaphor for the students' construction of meaning and to exemplify the discipline of citation and attribution. This paper outlines a method that metaphorically and literally enables students to construct and make visible the underlying theoretical philosophy of referencing and plagiarism by using Lego as a mode of authorship, in the context of the nature of academic discourse and what it means to write. In addition, the personal, engaging nature of the activity meant that it would be a more memorable activity too.     

The illusory dichotomy of plagiarism

Plagiarism has been characterised as a ‘major problem’ for universities. While tensions between students and universities are inevitable, the problem with the existing system of plagiarism management and prevention is that it operates to problematise the relationship between the university and the student, rather than address the core academic issues. As a result, a dichotomy is created where the student interest is constructed as adverse to that of the institution. This article argues that de-dichotomisation of the current polarity of plagiarism will open space for alternative thoughtful considerations in dealing with plagiarism positively in an institutional context.     

Awareness about plagiarism amongst university students in Pakistan

Research is an original and systematic investigation undertaken to discover new facts and information about a phenomenon. However a variety of empirical and ethical issues are on the rise in academia, especially plagiarism is quickly becoming part of global educational and research culture. More and more students and researchers are turning to the Internet for cooked solutions and shortcuts for writing assignments, research papers and thesis. The purpose of this paper is to highlight the seriousness of plagiarism amongst graduate and post graduate students of Pakistan. It also explores the university students’ level of awareness of plagiarism. A total of 365 graduate and post graduate students of randomly selected public and private sector universities participated in this exploratory empirical study. A self-reported questionnaire survey was used for collection of primary data. Findings revealed that there was a low level of awareness about plagiarism and university plagiarism policies and processes amongst the students. Findings also revealed that many respondents did not understand what plagiarism is? A significant number of students have fairly admitted that they have intentionally plagiarized written materials. Based on the findings of the study this paper puts forward recommendations to create awareness amongst the students regarding plagiarism, plagiarism policies and provides statistical evidences for formulation of policies and guidelines to combat plagiarism in institutions of higher learning in Pakistan. Furthermore, the paper submits recommendations to minimize the plagiarism based on the authors’ experiences.     

Reducing unintentional plagiarism amongst international students in the biological sciences: An embedded academic writing development programme

There is general agreement in the literature that international students are more likely to plagiarise compared to their native speaker peers and, in many instances, plagiarism is unintentional. In this article we describe the effectiveness of an academic writing development programme embedded into a Biological Sciences Taught Masters course designed to reduce unintentional plagiarism amongst international students in the cohort. We compared plagiarism rates in the years before and after the implementation of the writing intervention. In addition, we analysed data from a high response rate questionnaire (87.8%: class of 90 students) designed to evaluate students’ perceptions of the usefulness of the writing development programme and to elicit information about their prior educational experiences which might relate to plagiarism. Our combined quantitative and qualitative data show that an early pedagogical response reduced plagiarism levels amongst international students. However, the UK and international students in the same cohort reported markedly different responses to the writing programme. We therefore suggest that, if international students are provided with an initial opportunity to practise academic writing and receive feedback, they are more likely to be successful when writing coursework assignments later on. However, any initial writing development programme should be adapted to accommodate the differing needs of the UK and international students within the cohort.     

Evaluation of intervention on Chinese graduate students’ understanding of textual plagiarism and skills at source referencing

Abstract

Textual plagiarism is a serious violation of established academic protocols, but it requires considerable writing experience and care to avoid as well. Although student understanding of textual plagiarism and their plagiaristic behaviour in English as a Second Language (ESL) and English as a Foreign Language (EFL) contexts have been quite well researched, few studies have sought to evaluate instructional interventions specifically designed to reduce plagiarism by empowering student writers with a better knowledge of plagiarism and skills at source referencing. To the best of our knowledge, no study to date has ever systematically assessed students’ understanding of plagiarism and their source referencing performance in response to intervention. This classroom-based research, at a university in Beijing, aimed to discover whether a 6-hour block of instruction could facilitate better understanding of plagiarism and appropriate source referencing skills. The results showed that the intervention did generally give students a better appreciation of how textual plagiarism looks and significantly reduced blatant and subtle plagiarism in their writing. However, students’ heavy reliance on original source language did frequently reoccur in student writing if in less clear-cut ways. Some helpful lessons were drawn from this study.     

Source-code plagiarism in universities: a comparative study of student perspectives in China and the UK

There has been much research and discussion relating to variations in plagiaristic activity observed in students from different demographic backgrounds. Differences in behaviour have been noted in many studies, although the underlying reasons are still a matter of debate. Existing work focuses mainly on textual plagiarism, and most often derives results by studying (small) groups of overseas students studying in a Western context. This study investigates understanding of source-code plagiarism (i.e. plagiarism of computer programmes) amongst university students in China. The survey instrument was a Chinese translation of a survey previously administered in English in the UK. This paper reports the results of the exploratory survey conducted in China, and compares these results to those from a parallel survey conducted in the UK. The results show that there is a significant difference in understanding between the respondents from the two surveys, and suggest topics which a future and more comprehensive study may focus on.     

A model for exploring student understandings of plagiarism

A clear understanding of how students view plagiarism is needed if the extensive efforts devoted to helping them engage in high-quality scholarship are to be worthwhile. There are a variety of views on this topic, but theoretical models to integrate the literature, take account of international differences and guide practitioners are limited. Using a large, international student sample, this paper presents just such a model. More than 2500 university students in the UK and Australia completed a questionnaire rating the perceived ‘seriousness' of various plagiarism-related actions in an individual assignment. Factor analysis identified three underlying themes: dishonest acts, poor referencing, and group work. Group comparisons indicated statistically significant differences in student understanding dependent on previous region of study, current faculty/school and level of study, with the former two emerging as more influential than the latter. This three-factor model provides practitioners with a methodology for integrating the many different studies in the area and gaining a broader overview of student understanding of plagiarism. In particular, it highlights how students consider plagiarism related to group work to be far less serious than other types. Given the increasing emphasis on group work in higher education, the implications of this for policy and practice are discussed. Importantly, the study also notes that effect sizes were small, suggesting that findings in this study, as in other studies, may not represent substantive differences in student perceptions. A single, universal approach to educating students about plagiarism may be as effective as approaches tailored to the individual's background.     

模块化大学生素质评价体系构想

本文从分析现行大学生评价模式存在的缺陷入手,提出了构建模块化大学生素质评价体系的五奈原则。在此基础上,对评价内容、评价方法进行了具体的分析与阐述。评价内容分为思想道德素质、专业素质、人文素质,创新精神和实践能力、身心素质五个模块;评价方法上采用单项素质评价与模块化组合素质评价、自评与他评、形成性评价与终结性评价相结合的评价方法,各模块相对独立,凸现学生的优势和特长,     

Skills training to avoid inadvertent plagiarism: results from a randomised control study

Plagiarism continues to be a concern within academic institutions. The current study utilised a randomised control trial of 137 new entry tertiary students to assess the efficacy of a scalable short training session on paraphrasing, patch writing and plagiarism. The results indicate that the training significantly enhanced students' overall knowledge about in-text referencing protocols. Importantly, this knowledge was found to translate into applied skills, with the intervention group performing significantly better in a practical skills application task. Moreover, the findings suggest that it is confidence in writing in English, not language background per se, which plays a significant role in students' practical skills in referencing and their confidence in performing assignment preparation tasks that can help them avoid claims of inadvertent plagiarism.     

使用边界模块优化EL~(++)本体推理(英文)

为了优化本体推理, 提出了一种在EL++本体中的公理模块提取方法.该方法通过分析符号解释域的边界和公理间的关系计算出给定推理任务的边界模块, 对于与推理任务中所有符号相关的公理集合, 采用边界分割和交集计算来提取最终的边界模块, 并提高模块的紧凑性.模块的正确性通过计算和推理任务中符号直接和间接相关的公理得到保证.给出了边界模块的理论基础和求解算法, 并通过符号边界和逻辑蕴涵之间的关系证明了模块的正确性.边界模块提取方法在EL++描述逻辑语言上进行了实现,现实的本体实验评估表明, 基于边界模块的推理比不采用模块的推理在性能上有很大的提高.     

关于本科毕业论文(设计)抄袭现象的思考与对策

通过网络对本科毕业论文(设计)进行了检索比对,指出“文献引用不规范”等5种情况是造成重复率高(抄袭)的主要原因.在不考虑学生诚信等主观因素的前提下,分析指出教学资源不足和教学管理不完善是造成重复率高(抄袭)的客观原因,并提出了解决问题的针对性方案.     

基于．NET 高校新生报到自动生成系统的设计

基于．Net、数据库技术及 web 平台,通过高校新生报到系统开发的必要性、功能模块、业务数据的分析与研究,结合 Javascrip 技术设计 B/S 模式及 OutLook 风格的自动生成模块功能的新生报到系统。该系统管理员可直接通过模块管理自行定义业务模块及链接程序地址,无须编写程序代码即可快速生成报到系统二级菜单;通过用户管理及权限管理选择实现不同权限用户拥有各自功能菜单的个性界面并保证了系统的信息安全。该系统操作简单、方便且设计思路独特,对 B/S 模式的各类信息系统的开发具有一定的借鉴意义及推广应用价值。