Beth Cook

Academic integrity: differences between computing assessments and essays

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.

Academic integrity perceptions regarding computing assessments and essays

Student perceptions of academic integrity have been extensively researched in relation to text-based assessments, but there is rather less research relating to non-text-based assessments such as computer programs, databases, and spreadsheets. This paper reports the findings from a survey of computing students and academics to investigate perceptions of particular academic practices with regard to both essays and computing assessments. For each practice the research sought to discover whether it was perceived to constitute plagiarism or collusion and whether it was considered to be acceptable in an academic environment. While there was general agreement between academics and students regarding some practices, both groups displayed high levels of uncertainty about other practices. There was considerable variation between their attitudes to similar practices in the text and non-text environments, and between what was seen as plagiarism/collusion and perceptions of unacceptability. That is, there were practices that were perceived to be plagiarism or collusion but were considered acceptable, and others that were considered not to be plagiarism or collusion but were nevertheless thought unacceptable. These findings suggest a need for academic integrity policies and procedures specific to computing, accompanied by discipline-specific student education.

Student perceptions of the acceptability of various code-writing practices

This paper reports on research that used focus groups and a national online survey of computing students at Australian universities to investigate perceptions of acceptable academic practices in writing program code for assessment. The results indicate that computing students lack a comprehensive understanding of what constitutes acceptable academic practice with regard to writing program code. They are not clear on the need to reference code taken from other sources, or on how to do so. Where code from other sources is used, or inappropriate collaboration takes place between students, there appears to be a feeling that any academic misconduct is diminished or even nullified if the students subsequently work with the code to make it their own. These findings suggest a need for the development of standards that elucidate acceptable practices for computing, combined with ongoing education of computing students.