dbosk
commented
5 years ago Date: Tue, 10 Sep 2019 09:30:08 -0700
From: Tony Mason wamason@GMAIL.COM
To: SIGCSE-members@LISTSERV.ACM.ORG
Subject: Re: [SIGCSE-members] Signing pledge to discourage plagiarism in CS
courses?
Collaboration Versus Cheating: Reducing Code Plagiarism in an Online MS
Computer Science Program
Mason, Gavrilovska & Joyner
https://doi.org/10.1145/3287324.3287443We tried a number of different approaches before finding that the educate + test paradigm had a measurable impact. My theory is that this is an issue of cognitive load: at the beginning of the semester, there is so much information being thrown at students that they don't necessarily know how to prioritize this relative to all the other information being pushed at them. By the time the crunch comes they've forgotten it. Thus, the combination of educating them and then reinforcing it with an actual quiz (we make it worth 1% of the grade) ensured they understood how important we considered this.
The only other approach we found that was more effective was rapid and aggressive plagiarism detection and reporting - but that didn't decrease our plagiarism rate on the first project, only on subsequent projects. In addition, it turns out to be very resource intensive. Now we combine the two, which has been beneficial because our class size has grown by around 2x since we introduced that change (which is good because I'm the one that deals with prosecuting the cases).
Several other courses in our program have told me they've adopted this approach as well and seen similar (~50%) decreases in their plagiarism rate, though we have not written a follow-up paper on that yet.
https://github.com/fsgeek/collaboration-versus-cheating
Tony Mason
Collaboration Versus Cheating: Reducing Code Plagiarism in an Online MS Computer Science Program Mason, Gavrilovska & Joyner https://doi.org/10.1145/3287324.3287443