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=Assessment tasks provide guidance for students on intellectual property and plagiarism issues. =

Evidence
Plagiarism is very prevalent in universities. Hart & Friesner (2004) survey several studies that report that somewhere between 50-90% of students have engaged in some questionable academic activity. However, the reasons for plagiarizing that students cite differ from staff assumptions. Students tend to want a better grade, or plagiarize because of time pressure. There is some suggestion that students have not properly learned or internalized the appropriate rules for citation and referencing. Documentation clearly stating what is required in order to avoid plagiarizing and what is expected for good grades would seem necessary.

Explicit guidance and support should be provided to staff and students with policies and examples on intellectual property aspects, particularly copyright and plagiarism.

There are two general ways to combat plagiarism, the first is to ensure that the appropriate warnings and penalties are in place in the institutional procedures and student documentation. The second is to ‘fight technology with technology’ (Hart & Friesner 2004) and invest in cheating detection systems (see the next practice below). These authors provide some guidelines for instructing students about plagiarism issues and for preventing its occurrence.

Resources
Barrett & Malcolm (2006) describe a study they undertook with Science and Engineering students that embedded plagiarism education in the assessment process by getting students to send paraphrasing and summarizing work to Anti-plagiarism websites. The show that this sort of iteration can greatly reduce the proportion of potentially plagiarized work.

Carroll’s (2002) guide to plagiarism prevention contains tutorial material which can be used to indicate to students the boundaries of acceptable and unacceptable practice.

http://www.plagiarismadvice.org/ provides a wealth of information and papers directed at learning institutions in order to combat plagiarism.

Intellectual property and its fair use is summarized in the e-learning context by Waterhouse & Rogers (2004). They note that copyright law, fair use guidelines and associated Acts are ‘not infrequently misunderstood by students and sometimes by e-learning instructors’ (p.8).

RMIT university gives students a tutorial available online, with links to other support services and resources, on how to avoid plagiarism in assessment. http://mams.rmit.edu.au/ot6j9k9hp7guz.ppt