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Investigating Student Plagiarism Patterns and Correlations to Grades

Published: 08 March 2017 Publication History

Abstract

We analyzed 6 semesters of data from a large enrollment data structures course to identify instances of plagiarism in 4 assignments. We find that the majority of the identified plagiarism instances involve cross-semester cheating and are performed by students for whom the plagiarism is an isolated event (in the studied assignments). Second, we find that providing students an opportunity to work with a partner doesn't decrease the incidence of plagiarism. Third, while plagiarism on a given assignment is correlated with better than average scores on that assignment, plagiarism is negatively correlated with final grades in both the course that the plagiarism occurred and in a subsequent related course. Finally, we briefly describe the Algae open-source suite of plagiarism detectors and characterize the kinds of obfuscation that students apply to their plagiarized submissions and observe that no single algorithm appears to be sufficient to detect all of the cases.

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cover image ACM Conferences
SIGCSE '17: Proceedings of the 2017 ACM SIGCSE Technical Symposium on Computer Science Education
March 2017
838 pages
ISBN:9781450346986
DOI:10.1145/3017680
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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Published: 08 March 2017

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  1. data structures
  2. grades
  3. plagiarism

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  • (2024)Plagiarism in the Age of Generative AI: Cheating Method Change and Learning Loss in an Intro to CS CourseProceedings of the Eleventh ACM Conference on Learning @ Scale10.1145/3657604.3662046(75-85)Online publication date: 9-Jul-2024
  • (2024)Newly Created Assignments and The First Repository Effect on Inter-Semester PlagiarismProceedings of the Eleventh ACM Conference on Learning @ Scale10.1145/3657604.3662043(211-220)Online publication date: 9-Jul-2024
  • (2024)ChatGPT and Cheat Detection in CS1 Using a Program Autograding SystemProceedings of the 2024 on Innovation and Technology in Computer Science Education V. 110.1145/3649217.3653558(367-373)Online publication date: 3-Jul-2024
  • (2024)A Case for Bayesian GradingProceedings of the 2024 on ACM Virtual Global Computing Education Conference V. 110.1145/3649165.3703624(275-278)Online publication date: 5-Dec-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)The Postgraduate Student Perspective on Academic Misconduct in the Era of Essay Mills and Generative AI: A Case Study from Northeast England2024 IEEE Global Engineering Education Conference (EDUCON)10.1109/EDUCON60312.2024.10578821(1-7)Online publication date: 8-May-2024
  • (2023)Online Programming Exams - An Experience ReportProceedings of the 2023 Conference on Innovation and Technology in Computer Science Education V. 110.1145/3587102.3588829(436-442)Online publication date: 29-Jun-2023
  • (2023)Plagiarism Detection and its Effect on the Learning Outcomes2023 IEEE 35th International Conference on Software Engineering Education and Training (CSEE&T)10.1109/CSEET58097.2023.00021(99-108)Online publication date: Aug-2023
  • (2022)Automated Code Assessment for Education: Review, Classification and Perspectives on Techniques and ToolsSoftware10.3390/software10100021:1(3-30)Online publication date: 8-Feb-2022
  • (2022)Cheating Detection in Online Assessments via Timeline AnalysisProceedings of the 53rd ACM Technical Symposium on Computer Science Education - Volume 110.1145/3478431.3499368(98-104)Online publication date: 22-Feb-2022
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