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Academic integrity: differences between computing assessments and essays

Published: 14 November 2013 Publication History

Abstract

There appears to be a reasonably common understanding about plagiarism and collusion in essays and other assessment items written in prose text. However, most assessment items in computing are not based in prose. There are computer programs, databases, spreadsheets, and web designs, to name but a few. It is far from clear that the same sort of consensus about plagiarism and collusion applies when dealing with such assessment items; and indeed it is not clear that computing academics have the same core beliefs about originality of authorship as apply in the world of prose. We have conducted focus groups at three Australian universities to investigate what academics and students in computing think constitute breaches of academic integrity in non-text-based assessment items; how they regard such breaches; and how academics discourage such breaches, detect them, and deal with those that are found. We find a general belief that non-text-based computing assessments differ in this regard from text-based assessments, that the boundaries between acceptable and unacceptable practice are harder to define than they are for text assessments, and that there is a case for applying different standards to these two different types of assessment. We conclude by discussing what we can learn from these findings.

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    cover image ACM Other conferences
    Koli Calling '13: Proceedings of the 13th Koli Calling International Conference on Computing Education Research
    November 2013
    204 pages
    ISBN:9781450324823
    DOI:10.1145/2526968
    Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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    • Univ. Eastern Finland: University of Eastern Finland
    • The University of Newcastle, Australia
    • Turku University Foundation

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    Published: 14 November 2013

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    Author Tags

    1. academic integrity
    2. computing education
    3. non-text-based assessment

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    Koli Calling '13
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    Koli Calling '13 Paper Acceptance Rate 20 of 40 submissions, 50%;
    Overall Acceptance Rate 80 of 182 submissions, 44%

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    • (2024)Exploring the Impact of Assessment Policies on Marginalized Students' Experiences in Post-Secondary Programming CoursesProceedings of the 2024 ACM Conference on International Computing Education Research - Volume 110.1145/3632620.3671100(233-245)Online publication date: 12-Aug-2024
    • (2024)"I Didn't Know": Examining Student Understanding of Academic Dishonesty in Computer ScienceProceedings of the 55th ACM Technical Symposium on Computer Science Education V. 110.1145/3626252.3630753(757-763)Online publication date: 7-Mar-2024
    • (2024)Identifying AI Generated Code with Parallel KNN Weight Outlier DetectionAdvanced Technologies and the University of the Future10.1007/978-3-031-71530-3_29(459-470)Online publication date: 17-Dec-2024
    • (2024)Machine Learning Models to Detect AI-Assisted Code Anomaly in Introductory Programming CourseAdvanced Technologies and the University of the Future10.1007/978-3-031-71530-3_11(163-181)Online publication date: 17-Dec-2024
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    • (2023)Gamification to Help Inform Students About Programming Plagiarism and CollusionIEEE Transactions on Learning Technologies10.1109/TLT.2023.324389316:5(708-721)Online publication date: Oct-2023
    • (2023)High School Student Perspective of Programming Plagiarism and Collusion2023 IEEE World Engineering Education Conference (EDUNINE)10.1109/EDUNINE57531.2023.10102902(1-5)Online publication date: 12-Mar-2023
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