S6.2.6

=Teaching staff are provided with plagiarism and collusion detection systems. =

Evidence
Rust (2002) notes that students are more likely to abstain from a task, plagiarize, cheat, or take a surface approach if they believe tasks are not relevant. So one way to prevent these is to ensure that students are motivated and perceive the relevance of their work. However, some form of plagiarism and collusion detection system is likely to have both deterrent and enforcement effects.

Resources
Various methods exist for comparing students’ electronic work to online material. Some of these are quite sophisticated and access large databases. The Joint Information Systems Committee Plagiarism Advisory Service note, however, that technology can only ever help us and that the way forward requires Appropriate assessment mechanisms (encouraging student collaboration, a focus on evaluation rather than description, etc), a supportive institutional culture, clear definitions of plagiarism and policies for dealing with it and training for both staff and students (Carroll 2002).

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

The University of Wollongong has good guidelines for how to set assessment tasks that make plagiarizing difficult: http://www.uow.edu.au/about/teaching/goodpractice/UOW008507.html