Excellence in teaching

Chris McDonald is a Senior Lecturer in the School of Computer Science and Software Engineering, and an Adjunct Professor at Dartmouth College, USA. Chris received the Excellence in Teaching Award in 2003. This award represents a joint effort by the Guild and the University to recognise and reward exemplary teaching.

Many discussions on academic conduct quickly turn to focus on plagiarism, with most academics able to provide "war stories" involving students they have taught in recent years. The importance of accurate and equitable assessment provides us with the obligation to detect and resolve cases of plagiarism, if we can. Collectively, universities are spending millions of dollars developing and deploying computer software to automatically detect cases of plagiarism and, as a sad extension, to automatically mark the written work of large classes.

Considerable time and effort is devoted to detecting and resolving possible cases of plagiarism. Most of this time and effort is spent, naturally, after students have submitted their work, when we're hoping to assess the work in a timely manner, and return it before end of semester exams. Any additional time spent interviewing students suspected of plagiarism is often unpleasant for all.

It's clear that prevention is better than cure and, better again, is appreciating the common circumstances under which students feel the pressure to plagiarize the work of others. Understanding these circumstances, and trying to avoid them, can provide a great benefit to all.

My experience is that most students submitting plagiarized work do so because of time pressures, not because the students were lazy or because the assigned task was too difficult. Students have typically left their assignments until only days or hours before a deadline. Often, penalties for plagiarism incorrectly reward this "quick-fix" approach over submitting nothing, or submitting late.

Effort can be far better spent minimizing students' need to plagiarize the work of others. Two techniques, that have worked well for me are:

• Projects and assignments can have multiple deadlines

  Typical examples could include requiring students to first show a skeleton outline of their work, and then a draft, before the final submission. Having invested time and effort in meeting early deadlines, students are more likely to make the final submission. With the early feedback, students will attain a higher standard, and are less likely to go off-the-rails in their work (particularly as the developmental work will not be in isolation).

• Group Work

  Students can be permitted, and encouraged, to work in small groups. It is often cited that this approach enhances students' communication skills, provides individuals with someone else to bounce ideas off, and enables the setting of deeper questions than an individual can attempt in the available time. It also reduces the pressure on individual students to copy the work of others, and provides the student with a sense of ownership of the group's work.

Yes, both of these techniques introduce a greater workload, and are not without their own problems. However, they are both of far greater benefit to students, and it is far more satisfying for academics to be actually teaching than acting as Plagiarism Police.