Research Description

Plagiarism is a practice by students in response to pressures of time and performance, framing of the assessment for the student, guidance about acceptable behaviours, the use of detection tools, avoidance techniques in creating assessment, punitive and corrective policies and practices. Now that we have fairly good detection tools and fairly strong enforcement policies, how can we set assignments and how can we modify students behaviours to reduce the amount of plagiarism at acceptable cost and while retaining the use of assessment towards certifying individual skills.

Research Outline

I am always interested in the ways we can teach more effectively, and at the moment my particular interest is about how teaching staff think about plagiarism and why it happens, and how we can teach in ways to reduce the amount of plagiarism by students in their programming assignments.