No. 13, July 2022.
Technology makes it increasingly easy to search for information whether for research or for plagiarism on exams. How do you avoid plagiarism, when the answers are so accessible on the Internet? President Emeritus of the International Center for Academic Integrity and co-editor of "Cheating Academic Integrity: Lessons from 30 Years of Research," David Rettinger, offers some recommendations for reducing the motivation for plagiarism:
When the learning experience is stimulating according to Rettinger, good grades will be a natural consequence. 4- Develop a culture of mutual trust between instructor and students (see "Make your teaching-learning contract more explicit," number 12 of this blog).
These rules help reduce the incentive to plagiarize, but they do not eliminate the practice of plagiarism in classes of ninety students with assessment systems that use the curve. To prevent plagiarism in these environments, additional practices must be employed, for example:
If the final exam consists of a case analysis, select a new case or change the title, names, places and numbers of an existing case; and give an instruction or ask a question whose answer is not easy to copy. One of my favorites is: "Please do the analysis you think is appropriate and present your recommendations to... (name of the case protagonist).
Each answer is unique; as distinct as a fingerprint. In forty years I have not found copied answers. But they are not easy to grade. You have to develop a rubric, which is an instrument that allows you to objectively and critically evaluate the learning acquired and the skills developed by the students.
Grading answers with a well-designed rubric has advantages when receiving students with complaints about their grades. My first few such meetings were confrontational and tense, until I realized that these meetings offer an opportunity for learning. Instead of getting into a heated discussion, I let the student talk and just take notes. When it's over, I begin by detailing the learning objectives of the course and their relevance to management practice, before going into an explanation of expectations-based on the course objectives-of an outstanding, satisfactory or insufficient response.
I try to ensure that in the conversation, the student discovers or learns something of value. With this system, the complaint has never transcended and in a good number of cases, the student ends up thanking me at the end of our meeting.
When I first started teaching I used this same method for midterm exams, but it soon became impossible, due to time constraints, to provide timely feedback. I discovered that multiple-choice exams can measure critical thinking skills. You can minimize the risk of plagiarism by mixing up the sequence of questions and the order of answers to each question.
While technology can facilitate plagiarism, it also opens up new opportunities for instant, more frequent testing and reduces the weight of the final exam.
