Plagiarism Prevention is Discipline Specific: a view from Computer Science

Abstract

Many of the good practice guidelines on tackling plagiarism and collusion are appropriate primarily for essays and research projects. Within Computer Science, particularly in undergraduate first year modules, much assessment is on understanding principles and techniques and applying these to example systems. This is true also of Engineering and Mathematical disciplines where there is a foundation of laws and theories that must be mastered and in general only one right answer to a problem. When assessing such knowledge and its application, collusion is as much a problem as plagiarism. This paper reports on work carried out in a Computer Science department to look at ways in which student plagiarism and collusion in in-course assignments could be reduced. In order to create a document of good practice guidelines that would be of particular benefit to the staff of our department, we tackled the redesign in four waysconducted four different activities: a look at published guidelines on ways to minimise plagiarism, an analysis of assignments set in the previous year, a consideration of the type of learning that is characteristic of Computer Science and

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