Designing out plagiarism             Links to further information

Adapted from: Guide 2 - Designing out Opportunities for Plagiarism – Oxford Brookes  

1. Changing assessments

Don’t set the same assignment every time.

This is a particular problem with assignments which use traditional modes of assessment and set the student’s identical tasks every year.

If a lecturer sets the same essays, re-issues the same case studies or asks for reports on tried-and-tested practicals, year after year students will soon realise this and may copy essays from previous years.

Many students regard copying on such courses as simply common sense. Why should they make an effort when the lecturer does not?

2. Reconsider the learning outcomes

Decrease those course learning outcomes that ask for knowledge and understanding, substituting instead those that require analysis, evaluation and synthesis.

Consider adding information gathering to learning outcomes

To make copying harder don’t use learning outcomes that ask the student to explain, list or collect information then test their achievement by setting essays. The more analytical and creative the task, the less likely it already exists.

Include information-gathering skills as an outcome in its own right. A course where information gathering was valued explicitly would, in many instances, include the Web as a key source of information.

Accessing web-based information could be extended to include essay banks and "cheat" sites. Essay banks provide a useful teaching tool by asking students to mark such work using agreed assessment criteria. This active approach helps in ensuring criteria are both understood and applied in a student's own work.

3. Create individualised tasks

Design in assessment tasks with multiple solutions or set one that creates artefacts to capture individual effort

Some courses set a task that is the same for all students. Sometimes, this seems unavoidable because the skill is relatively straightforward, e.g. using an IT package or solving a practical problem. However, assessing application or comparison rather than use will encourage more individualised products.

For example, students could be asked to select a text themselves from an electronic source and reformat it then explain why they opted for the new format and why it is better than the original. Or students could be asked to compare in class their own solution with an alternative and explain which one is more effective using stated criteria.

Students might be given tasks which have common learning outcomes and assessment criteria but which produce different outputs.

For example students might be asked to produce a product of their choice and explain why they made that choice and why the product is fit for purpose.

Asking for different artefacts can significantly lessen the chances of submitted work being bought, faked or copied.

4. Build in overt structure and use a range of assessment formats

Integrate tasks so each builds on the other; design in checks that do not require teacher time but do require student effort.

Be careful to only check, not assess the intermediate tasks.

Building in overt structure encourages all students be as organised and strategic as the good ones.

Cheating and plagiarism are more common amongst weaker students with poor time management strategies

Designing in staging posts and requiring students to submit work for formative assessment will encourage forward planning.

Feedback through formative work done in taught sessions will allow the tutor to see that the work is that of the student.