My next topic of conversation is around detection of plagiarism and text matching.
We all use Turnitin in our institutions as the tool to check for this.
Have you got any comments, or thoughts,
about the use of plagiarism detection software?
>> We use Turnitin and I think you have to be very careful with it.
And I'm not, happy you're using
an impunitive sense at the moment.
Because it does rely on us teaching students how to reference properly,
how to avoid plagiarism.
I don't think we do that very well at the moment, I shouldn't say that on camera.
I then therefore used the results of, if you got a high index score,
to look at why the students are doing that.
And how we failed them in a sense of not showing them properly,
adhering to a certain referencing system.
But equally, I have found over the last few years that
the number of students with high scores, there's an English
language problem, so English may be a second language.
But there's also a cultural problem there, and
that's something that we've got to be very careful how we manage.
>> I think it's important that the students are aware of what Turnitin is for
and why it's there, and that it's part of what they're learning about.
But I suppose as we teach mostly graduate students,
I think they're more familiar with that now.
So I've never experienced a problem with plagiarism with students.
But I'm just glad we've got that check,
because it gives students some sense of security that this is a fair system.
And that's as important as anything else.
>> Some institutions don't allow their students to access their originality
reports, so they just submit their essay and that's it.
Whereas, others will provide that report to their students first as a sort of
a first draft of an assignment before they submit it.
>> That's something we're working in our department this year,
because we've done this the exact same in the past.
And one student last year sent me a panicked email,
I've got 63% similarity index.
What am I going to do?
So we are now trying to address referencing, plagiarism.
We are giving them the opportunity to get a report back before final submission.
This is all new at the moment,
so I haven't gotten feedback to give on how good that is.
But my perception is actually the students appreciate it more.
So I have yet to compile on that data.
>> I would agree, I think that you should prove,
it allows students to upload drafts and see.
Because it's a strange thing, undergraduate students, in particular,
they do struggle with getting the idea of referencing.
Why you have to do it, what it's for, and
that is a way of showing them why we do it.
And also to not sort of think that just because you've got
a high similarity that it automatically means something bad.
Because, it doesn't necessarily, or your similarities could be your references,
or they could be quotes, or absolutely fine.
It comes back to referencing and how well you've done that.
>> But it does rely on the academic being explicit about how you do the referencing,
how you break things down, how you avoid plagiarism.
And I don't think we've done that in our courses enough.
I mean, it is implicit, but we haven't explicitly said.
And that's what we're addressing as well.
The own it is on us and I don't think, if students have a high similarity index,
that it's necessarily always their fault.
It could be part of the way we're instructing them or
not instructing them as the case may be.
So I think whatever program you're teaching, whether it's face-to-face or
distance learning, there has to be a explicit component.
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