LOOKING TO MINIMISE PLAGIARISM IN AN ONLINE ASSESSMENT?

When setting an online assessment, the fear of plagiarism is strong. How can we ensure that

students are submitting their own work?

1. Be explicit about the damage plagiarism

does. There is a lot of information for

students about plagiarism and how they

can avoid it here. Similarly, there is a lot of

information for staff here, including an

overview of using Turnitin here.

2. Design assignments that build in difficulty

incrementally. Supporting the building of

their knowledge base will facilitate student

success in assignments. Once motivation

and schemata are established, students’

perceptions of assignments will change.

3. USE TECH: set assessment in Canvas for a specific time.

By setting it for a specific time (see below for

how to do this), you prevent students seeing

the assessment before it goes ‘live’. The

opportunity for exchanging information with

others is reduced, as is the ability to source

answers from the internet. Of course,

students may still chat with each other during

the assessment window, but this practice will

tend to self-penalize as their time to complete

the assessment will be shorter having spent

valuable time conferring with others.

The design of the assessment then is critical –

if you overestimate the time it should take,

you will open up time for conferring. It may

be better to set shorter assessments that

students will only complete in the given time

if they know the content. If you take this path,

it is important to explicitly tell the students

that the assessment is difficult in terms of

time – an unsuccessful student tends to give

up more easily if there appears to be a

randomness to achievement.

HOW TO SET AN ASSESSMENT FOR A SPECIFIED TIME

STEP 1 – add an assignment and choose Turnitin as the submission type (for heavy text-based

assignments). Select “External Tool” and then find “Turnitin”

Step 2 – assign to a group of students

Please note groups can be only be applied to an assignment using Canvas and not in Turnitin: BUT,

when you have selected Turnitin as the submission type, you can add students individually like this:

As a default, the assignment is

automatically assigned to everyone in the

course. You can remove that and add

individuals.

Select “+Add”:

Students that require alternate

arrangements can then be added

individually.

Due dates can be also be changed as

required:

To hide the assignment until a specified

time, choose the date and the time.

This is how the saved and published

assignment will then look for your students

FINAL THOUGHTS

Everyone likes to succeed. This is why

some students plagiarise. Careful design

of assessment that incrementally builds

student knowledge and confidence will

TEACH students to get better at

assessment. This, together with explicit

discussions about it, will help many

students steer clear of plagiarism.