A subject coordinator is dismayed to find that many of his applied programming students have submitted assignments containing copied source code. Jonathan is the subject coordinator in an undergraduate subject on applied programming. The assessment in this subject require students to design, implement, test and debug simple programs using a specific programming language. The assignments require students to submit program source code. Jonathan knows that students can be tempted to copy code from friends, the Internet, or a tutor’ rather than create their own source code. Jonathan ‘private tries to design the subject and the assessment tasks to reduce the opportunities to do this because he recognizes that if students do not acquire the skills to manipulate the programming language they will not really have met the intended learning outcomes of the subject. When one of Jonathon’s colleagues, Amy, asks if she can the program she has developed to test for shared code on some of the assignments submitted by Jonathan’s students Jonathan agrees, not thinking that any plagiarism of code would be detected. He is astonished to find over 15% of the students in his subject have submitted assignments containing code which Amy’s program indicates contains shared code. In Jonathan’s mind this means that students have copied. Questions for discussion What does your university policy say about designing the assessment of student learning to support student learning? What does your university policy say about the copying and translation of computer code? What does your university policy say about the copying and translation of computer code from one computer language into another (also called or ‘porting’ plagiarism’? ‘inter-lingual What other information would Jonathan need in order to make sound interpretations of the meaning of Amy’s findings? What strategies could Jonathan implement to reduce the incentive to, and risk of, students copying code? It is acceptable for Jonathan to investigate the matters further given that students did not receive any notice that their assignments would be analyses using Amy’s program? What information should Jonathan obtain about the quality of Amy’s program before using it to analyse student assignments Suggested readings
A subject coordinator is dismayed to find that many of his applied programming students have submitted assignments containing copied source code. Jonathan is the subject coordinator in an undergraduate subject on applied programming. The assessment in this subject require students to design, implement, test and debug simple programs using a specific programming language. The assignments require students to submit program source code. Jonathan knows that students can be tempted to copy code from friends, the Internet, or a ‘private tutor’ rather than create their own source code. Jonathan tries to design the subject and the assessment tasks to reduce the opportunities to do this because he recognizes that if students do not acquire the skills to manipulate the programming language they will not really have met the intended learning outcomes of the subject. When one of Jonathon’s colleagues, Amy, asks if she can the program she has developed to test for shared code on some of the assignments submitted by Jonathan’s students Jonathan agrees, not thinking that any plagiarism of code would be detected. He is astonished to find over 15% of the students in his subject have submitted assignments containing code which Amy’s program indicates contains shared code. In Jonathan’s mind this means that students have copied. Questions for discussion What does your university policy say about designing the assessment of student learning to support student learning? What does your university policy say about the copying and translation of computer code? What does your university policy say about the copying and translation of computer code from one computer language into another (also called ‘porting’ or ‘inter-lingual plagiarism’? What other information would Jonathan need in order to make sound interpretations of the meaning of Amy’s findings? What strategies could Jonathan implement to reduce the incentive to, and risk of, students copying code? It is acceptable for Jonathan to investigate the matters further given that students did not receive any notice that their assignments would be analyses using Amy’s program? What information should Jonathan obtain about the quality of Amy’s program before using it to analyse student assignments Suggested readings
Cases%20studies%20on%20academic%20integrity.docx