Thursday, March 26, 2009

Combating Academic Plagiarism

Combating Student Plagiarism: An Academic Librarian's Guide (Chandos Series for Information Professionals) by Lynn D Lampert (Chandos Publishing, 2008) suggests requiring students provide a bibliography with written assignments and also submit drafts and parts of assignments progressively as they work. This is designed to make it more difficult for students to show how they got to their final work. This might also make it easier for the student, rewarding them with marks for the progress of the work and thefore encouraging them to work in stages, rather than leaving everything to just beofre the final deadline for the finised work. This would work with online Learning management Systems, such as Moodle. The student would be able to submit parts of the work as they progressed and the assessor would not be swamped with bits of paper. This might be taken further to provide the student with an online set of tools fort keeping track of their work, including the bibilography. Also for group assignments, an online system with some of the features of social networking could keep track of who contributed what.

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