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
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