looking to minimise plagiarism in an online assessment? · 2020. 2. 28. · looking to minimise...
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LOOKING TO MINIMISE PLAGIARISM IN AN ONLINE ASSESSMENT?
When setting an online assessment, the fear of plagiarism is strong. How can we ensure that
students are submitting their own work?
1. Be explicit about the damage plagiarism
does. There is a lot of information for
students about plagiarism and how they
can avoid it here. Similarly, there is a lot of
information for staff here, including an
overview of using Turnitin here.
2. Design assignments that build in difficulty
incrementally. Supporting the building of
their knowledge base will facilitate student
success in assignments. Once motivation
and schemata are established, students’
perceptions of assignments will change.
3. USE TECH: set assessment in Canvas for a specific time.
By setting it for a specific time (see below for
how to do this), you prevent students seeing
the assessment before it goes ‘live’. The
opportunity for exchanging information with
others is reduced, as is the ability to source
answers from the internet. Of course,
students may still chat with each other during
the assessment window, but this practice will
tend to self-penalize as their time to complete
the assessment will be shorter having spent
valuable time conferring with others.
The design of the assessment then is critical –
if you overestimate the time it should take,
you will open up time for conferring. It may
be better to set shorter assessments that
students will only complete in the given time
if they know the content. If you take this path,
it is important to explicitly tell the students
that the assessment is difficult in terms of
time – an unsuccessful student tends to give
up more easily if there appears to be a
randomness to achievement.
HOW TO SET AN ASSESSMENT FOR A SPECIFIED TIME
STEP 1 – add an assignment and choose Turnitin as the submission type (for heavy text-based
assignments). Select “External Tool” and then find “Turnitin”
Step 2 – assign to a group of students
Please note groups can be only be applied to an assignment using Canvas and not in Turnitin: BUT,
when you have selected Turnitin as the submission type, you can add students individually like this:
As a default, the assignment is
automatically assigned to everyone in the
course. You can remove that and add
individuals.
Select “+Add”:
Students that require alternate
arrangements can then be added
individually.
Due dates can be also be changed as
required:
To hide the assignment until a specified
time, choose the date and the time.
This is how the saved and published
assignment will then look for your students
FINAL THOUGHTS
Everyone likes to succeed. This is why
some students plagiarise. Careful design
of assessment that incrementally builds
student knowledge and confidence will
TEACH students to get better at
assessment. This, together with explicit
discussions about it, will help many
students steer clear of plagiarism.