Abstract | Plagiarism is a problem that has gained notoriety in recent years as academia tries to credit students with skills examined through submitted coursework, but often finds that the submitted work is partly - or sometimes fully - not the students' work. Crediting the students with skills they have not demonstrated is a problem with severe repurcussions (e.g. awarding degress to future decision-makers who lack the skills to make the correct decisions) that are recognised and accepted by academics and students. Yet when the student believes that a correct answer to a coursework can be found on the Internet or in a computer of a friendly (or unaware) fellow student the temptationto pass someone else's work as one's own is sometimes too hard to resist. Information Technology (IT) has helped students who plagiarise to do so with greater ease than ever before; yet IT can also help in both the detection and the prevention of plagiarism. This paper presents a number of different approaches of using IT to combat this problem over the past 10 years in a number of undergraduate and postgraduate courses, and the lessons drawn from applying these techniques. |
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