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Dear Colleagues Recently I have prepared an internal paper on the acceptable limits of collaboration - or where unacceptable collusion starts among students. I suspect that there is more collusion than most of us want to consider. If we worry about standards of degrees, we should probably be considering these cheating issues more than we do. Any thoughts? The other matter is related. During my work on this paper, I followed up an item on Radio 4's PM programme. This was about some software which would help in the indication of collusion. I followed it up and have now seen it and think that it would play a very helpful role in both finding where collusion might be occurring, in teaching students what is acceptable and not acceptable and in acting as a threat of easier detection. The software is developed by David Woolls. I am publicising this not for commercial reasons, but because I think that it is a genuinely valuable resource. I asked David to describe it for this message. He says: 'In the last few years, it has become much easier for students to share work electronically, which has resulted in some cases of peer-group plagiarism as distinct from plagiarising academic literature. To counter this problem, a program, CopyCatch, has been developed which can process a large number of related texts and reports on high levels of vocabulary and phrasal overlap between any two of those texts. This is a diagnostic tool which is derived from a wider set of techniques used by forensic linguists who are asked to give opinions on suspicious texts. For anyone or any institutions interested, the contact is David Woolls, of CFL Software Development. David worked with forensic linguists at the University of Birmingham. He can be contacted at [log in to unmask] Jennifer Moon Jennifer Moon, Learning Support, University of Wales Cardiff, (based in) Department of Continuing Education, 38, Park Place, Ca rdiff CF1 3AT 01222 876248 %%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%