Thomas Lancaster
Imperial College London, Computing, Faculty Member
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Computer Science, Human Computer Interaction, Higher Education, E-learning, Programming Languages, Instructional Design, and 15 moreAssessment, Visualization, Computer-Based Learning, Computer Science Education, Cheating and Plagiarism, Plagiarism Detection, Contract Cheating, Employability, Social Media, ICT in Education, Plagiarism, Academic Integrity, Hackathons, Global Game Jam, and Game jams edit
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My main research interests are in academic integrity, with particular research specialisms in contract cheating and d... moreMy main research interests are in academic integrity, with particular research specialisms in contract cheating and detecting student plagiarism. I regular deliver keynote addresses on academic integrity.
During my career, I have held a variety of teaching and leadership roles, primarily focused on Computer Science. I currently work part time at Imperial College London.
I am a Senior Fellow of the Higher Education Academy. edit -
Fintan Culwinedit
Video presentation can be viewed at https://media.tru.ca/playlist/dedicated/0_0u3o63xd/0_ngpid8x
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As the contract cheating market has become more sophisticated and competition has intensified, the contract cheating industry has had to redevelop its approach to gain custom. The industry has developed new models of internal operation... more
As the contract cheating market has become more sophisticated and competition has intensified, the contract cheating industry has had to redevelop its approach to gain custom. The industry has developed new models of internal operation and providers are using more sophisticated techniques to reach potential customers. This paper discusses contract cheating industry workflows and introduces terminology to allow complexities of the industry to be more consistently discussed. Examples are provided throughout to indicate the scale and challenge of the contract cheating industry operations.An analysis of contract cheating operations on the micro-outsourcing website Fiverr.com is presented, using comparative data collected in June 2016 and October 2018. The analysis of the data demonstrates how the contract cheating industry is seeing continual change. Specifically, on Fiverr.com, this includes an increase in the number of providers offering essay writing services, particularly those from...
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For Computer Science instructors, upholding academic integrity requires approaching teaching and assessment in a way that communicates progressive principles such as honesty, trust, fairness, respect and responsibility to students, At the... more
For Computer Science instructors, upholding academic integrity requires approaching teaching and assessment in a way that communicates progressive principles such as honesty, trust, fairness, respect and responsibility to students, At the same time, instructors also have to take steps to make it untenable for students to commit academic misconduct. This means that instructors need to be aware of unacceptable conduct by students, covering behaviours such as plagiarism, collusion, contract cheating, examination cheating and research fraud. Instructors also need to put measures into place to design out opportunities for students to engage in such unacceptable behaviours. This chapter explores academic integrity from the perspective of the knowledge needed by a Computer Science instructor. This is a changeable feast, as new methods to subvert academic integrity are always emerging, particularly in Computer Science where many students have the skills needed to develop the technology that aids new ways of cheating. As such, the chapter recommends that instructors deliver their curriculum with a pro-active focus on academic integrity from the outset. This includes leading by example and developing assessments that remove easy opportunities for students to cheat. This also means putting methods of detecting academic misconduct in place, even if detecting misconduct is only really intended as a measure designed to disincentivise students from cheating since they may get caught.
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This paper investigates the online collection of companies of essay mills, contract cheating services, and auction sites (herein referred to as the Industry) that enable students to cheat in their written assignments. These companies... more
This paper investigates the online collection of companies of essay mills, contract cheating services, and auction sites (herein referred to as the Industry) that enable students to cheat in their written assignments. These companies offer to help students by connecting them through secure sites to pre-written papers or commissioned and contracted writers. As well as selling original papers, these companies afford further academic misconduct such as writing exams, preparing presentations, or completing full courses for students. Plagiarism, cheating and other forms of academic misconduct continue to be discouraged throughout post-secondary education, however, these companies are working against the sector encouraging these practices. Such cheating is often a company’s raison d'etre. The paper argues that the Industry can be seen to sanction plagiarism and cheating. It accomplishes this by leaning heavily on, but reframing, mainstream and dominant neoliberal market-economy discou...
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Despite the best efforts of instructors to promote academic integrity, some students will always engage in academic misconduct. This manifests itself in forms such as plagiarism, contract cheating and exam cheating. There are particular... more
Despite the best efforts of instructors to promote academic integrity, some students will always engage in academic misconduct. This manifests itself in forms such as plagiarism, contract cheating and exam cheating. There are particular academic misconduct challenges in computing not seen in other disciplines. In this discipline, students are tech-savvy and regularly exposed online to material on “how to cheat”. Students are expected not only to become proficient writers, but also to develop programming skills and incorporate source code written by third parties which they access online in code repositories. When computing courses are taught in transnational education (TNE) settings, there is further cause for concern. Local norms may mean that the sharing of knowledge and information amongst students is expected, even though this would be considered to be a form of collusion elsewhere. Interpretations of what is meant by academic integrity may differ. Technical solutions to identif...
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Is academic integrity research presented from a positive integrity standpoint? This paper uses Natural Language Processing (NLP) techniques to explore a data set of 8,507 academic integrity papers published between 1904 and 2019.Two main... more
Is academic integrity research presented from a positive integrity standpoint? This paper uses Natural Language Processing (NLP) techniques to explore a data set of 8,507 academic integrity papers published between 1904 and 2019.Two main techniques are used to linguistically examine paper titles: (1) bigram (word pair) analysis and (2) sentiment analysis. The analysis sees the three main bigrams used in paper titles as being “academic integrity” (2.38%), “academic dishonesty” (2.06%) and “plagiarism detection” (1.05%). When only highly cited papers are considered, negative integrity bigrams dominate positive integrity bigrams. For example, the 100 most cited academic integrity papers of all time are three times more likely to have “academic dishonesty” included in their titles than “academic integrity”. Similarly, sentiment analysis sees negative sentiment outperforming positive sentiment in the most cited papers.The history of academic integrity research is seen to place the field ...
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Very few parts of the world have legislation that prohibits the operation or the promotion of contract cheating services. This means that commercial companies providing such services can formally register and operate in most countries. If... more
Very few parts of the world have legislation that prohibits the operation or the promotion of contract cheating services. This means that commercial companies providing such services can formally register and operate in most countries. If a student enters into an agreement with a contract cheating provider, what rights do they have to change their mind and what are the risks if they choose to do so? This paper examines the question through legal, institutional and societal lenses, showing that although a student has the consumer rights to withdraw from a contract with an essay mill, they may also be putting their future at risk by doing so. Contract cheating providers are now embedded within many institutions, using sharp practices to connect with vulnerable customers, but are also perfectly placed to blackmail students or threaten to report them to their institution if they ask to cancel their order. The paper argues that, while not condoning the practice of contract cheating, supp...
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Students are using file sharing sites to breach academic integrity in light of the Covid-19 pandemic. This paper analyses the use of one such site, Chegg, which offers “homework help” and other academic services to students. Chegg is... more
Students are using file sharing sites to breach academic integrity in light of the Covid-19 pandemic. This paper analyses the use of one such site, Chegg, which offers “homework help” and other academic services to students. Chegg is often presented as a file sharing site in the academic literature, but that is just one of many ways in which it can be used. As this paper demonstrates, Chegg can and is used for contract cheating This is despite the apparent existence of an Honour Code on Chegg which asks students not to breach academic integrity. With pandemic led safety considerations leading to increased online teaching and assessment, the paper analyses data relating to how Chegg is used by students in five STEM subjects, namely Computer Science, Mechanical Engineering, Electrical Engineering, Physics and Chemistry. The results show that students are using Chegg to request exam style questions. They demonstrate that contract cheating requests can be put live and answered within th...
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Abstract Contract cheating providers exist as businesses with a single shared intention, to profit on a student’s inability to fulfil academic requirements for themselves. For contract cheating providers to make money, the correct market... more
Abstract Contract cheating providers exist as businesses with a single shared intention, to profit on a student’s inability to fulfil academic requirements for themselves. For contract cheating providers to make money, the correct market conditions are required. First, providers need to be able to offer the expertise that students request. Second, students need to be financially able to pay for specialist support across a diverse range of different areas. If students are unable to meet the price or require expertise that providers do not offer, the transaction is not going to be completed. Therefore, an examination of the demand-side of the contract cheating process in terms of subject matter expertise and the price of offers is important. The research presented in this paper is based on the analysis of 1579 Twitter messages (tweets) that contract cheating providers engaged with. The study aims to examine price variation and the type of assignments students seek to outsource. For typical requests such as essay writing, students are shown to be willing to pay $33.32 per 1000 words. Some services carry a premium, particularly where a student wishes to hire an impersonator to take an examination for them. The student demand for paid help is seen to be highest in the mathematics field, suggesting that students feel under-equipped and under-supported in this area. The paper concludes by discussing further implications of this research and strategies for the minimisation of contract cheating.
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ABSTRACT Student cheating and plagiarism present a combined threat to the value of academic awards. The technological age has increased the ease with which students can cheat. Although some computerised solutions exist to detect... more
ABSTRACT Student cheating and plagiarism present a combined threat to the value of academic awards. The technological age has increased the ease with which students can cheat. Although some computerised solutions exist to detect plagiarism and cheating in its other forms, many of these are easily fooled. For other types of cheating, technical solutions are not yet widely available. This suggests that students are receiving awards that they do not deserve. This paper presents three different examples of student cheating, all of which provide academics with a problem. These issues include: (1) plagiarism of documents through automated essay spinning, (2) social media facilitated student cheating groups, and (3) contract cheating using agency and auction web sites. Each of these problems is shown to benefit from the provision of intelligent context-aware systems. The context behind each problem is explored and suggestions for technical implementations of intelligent context-aware systems for each are provided.
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ABSTRACT The process of contract cheating, the form of academic dishonesty where students outsource the creation of work on their behalf, has been recognised as a serious threat to the quality of academic awards. Unlike student... more
ABSTRACT The process of contract cheating, the form of academic dishonesty where students outsource the creation of work on their behalf, has been recognised as a serious threat to the quality of academic awards. Unlike student plagiarism, this cheating behaviour is not currently detectable using automated tools. This paper analyses the monetary value of contract cheating to the different parties who play a role in the contract cheating process. The main analysis is based on a corpus consisting of 14,438 identified attempts to cheat. The corpus was collected between March 2005 and July 2012. The corpus was formed as part of a manual contract cheating detection process identifying students using online agencies. These online agencies are web sites which enable students to contract cheat. The agencies usually benefit from this by receiving a percentage cut of the money raised from the contract cheating that they facilitate. This corpus is used as the basis of an attempt to quantify the monetary value of contract cheating to online agencies. Other parties exist who benefit from the contract cheating process. The paper identifies several such parties and gives examples of the monetary value of contract cheating to each of them. Most notably this includes the contractors who bid for the opportunity to produce work on behalf of the students. Further, the paper identifies the role of intermediary contractors. These are people who post assignment requests on agency sites but who are not themselves students. These intermediary contractors appear to benefit by first receiving requests to complete work for students and then re-outsourcing this work at a much lower cost than they were paid. The group of frequent workers, that is people who regularly work on student assignments and hence benefit financially, is also identified. The paper concludes by presenting the changing trends in contract cheating that the authors have observed since they started working against this form of academic misconduct in 2005. Finally, recommendations for academics towards dealing with the issues posed by contract cheating are provided.
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This paper examines automated essay spinning, where a new variant of an essay can be easily produced by a student for them to submit for academic credit. This new essay represents plagiarism. Four spinning processes are tested to generate... more
This paper examines automated essay spinning, where a new variant of an essay can be easily produced by a student for them to submit for academic credit. This new essay represents plagiarism. Four spinning processes are tested to generate new versions of three corpora of documents. The originality of documents in the new corpora are assessed using three plagiarism detection tools, Turnitin, TRanker and Ferret. The technique of Automated Translation, where an essay is translated to and from English, ...
The issue of attribution, identifying the institutions which students who attempt to outsource work are from, poses a major difficulty for detectives monitoring online sites used for contract cheating. This form of academic misconduct... more
The issue of attribution, identifying the institutions which students who attempt to outsource work are from, poses a major difficulty for detectives monitoring online sites used for contract cheating. This form of academic misconduct occurs when students get other people to complete assessed work for them. Previous studies on contract cheating have focused on student use of Internet-based outsourcing services. The studies have demonstrated that those sites primarily provide students with work for subjects falling ...
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Much research in the plagiarism detection literature relates to attempting to discover which students have copied student source code submissions from one another–a process commonly known as collusion. The majority of the collusion... more
Much research in the plagiarism detection literature relates to attempting to discover which students have copied student source code submissions from one another–a process commonly known as collusion. The majority of the collusion literature suggests that structure metrics (metrics that look beyond semantics to attempt to find disguise) are the most appropriate comparators for finding such collusion. This paper contrasts two paired structure metrics with a paired superficial metric, the metrics having been identified from the ...
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Summary Many tutors believe that plagiarism, especially copying material from the Web, is a significant and increasing problem in UK higher education institutions. A number of academic and commercial groups are researching the nature and... more
Summary Many tutors believe that plagiarism, especially copying material from the Web, is a significant and increasing problem in UK higher education institutions. A number of academic and commercial groups are researching the nature and extent of the problem and are developing software tools and systems for plagiarism detection.
Search all the public and authenticated articles in CiteULike. Include unauthenticated results too (may include "spam") Enter a search phrase. You can also specify a CiteULike article id (123456),. a DOI (doi:10.1234/12345678).... more
Search all the public and authenticated articles in CiteULike. Include unauthenticated results too (may include "spam") Enter a search phrase. You can also specify a CiteULike article id (123456),. a DOI (doi:10.1234/12345678). or a PubMed ID (pmid:12345678). Click Help for advanced usage. CiteULike, Group: e-plagiarism, Search, Register, Log in, ...
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The paper studies the use the RentACoder Web site to contract cheat by Computing students. RentACoder is an outsourcing service for computer work which operates under auction principles. Contract cheating is where students have assessed... more
The paper studies the use the RentACoder Web site to contract cheat by Computing students. RentACoder is an outsourcing service for computer work which operates under auction principles. Contract cheating is where students have assessed work completed for them on their behalf. The work is original, so not will be detected by the regular anti-plagiarism mechanisms that look for shared commonality. The paper describes the background to contract cheating and discusses a catalogue of 910 bid requests collected by the authors over two and a half years. The UK is seen to supply them with over 25 % of contract cheating bid requests. This is largely composed of students outsourcing Java programming assignments; substantial projects are highlighted as a concern. Trends are seen to exist for other countries but are not the same as those identified for UK students.
The paper identifies a growing problem, referred to as contract cheating, considered to be the successor to pure plagiarism. Contract cheating is defined as the submission of work by students for academic credit which the students have... more
The paper identifies a growing problem, referred to as contract cheating, considered to be the successor to pure plagiarism. Contract cheating is defined as the submission of work by students for academic credit which the students have paid contractors to write for them. The usage of one particular site, RentACoder, known to be used for contract cheating is manually monitored. RentACoder is a site where computer solutions are written to contract for legitimate uses but can also be used for students to cheat. An exhaustive study shows that 12.3 % of bid requests placed on RentACoder are identified as contract cheating. The primary study reported in the paper quantifies and discusses these contract cheaters. Out of 236 identified contract cheaters only 8.1 % of these have made only a single bid request. Over half of the 236 cheaters have previously requested between two and seven pieces of work. The paper argues that this shows that this form of cheating is becoming habitual. The prim...
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This paper discusses research on contract cheating undertaken with students across six countries in South East Europe. The research was conducted as part of the South East European Project on Policies for Academic Integrity (SEEPPAI) and... more
This paper discusses research on contract cheating undertaken with students across six countries in South East Europe. The research was conducted as part of the South East European Project on Policies for Academic Integrity (SEEPPAI) and supported by a grant from the Council of Europe. Thirteen focus groups were held in which students discussed their experiences with contract cheating and wider issues of educational corruption. The trends identified showed that students knew how to gain contract cheating assistance in both coursework and examinations. Some students were themselves working as academic ghostwriters. Despite pockets of good practice being evident, there was the suggestion of a wider culture of corruption, with claims that some teaching staff were willing to take financial incentives to guarantee grades to students.The findings demonstrate that contract cheating represents a threat to academic integrity in countries where this had not previously been documented.
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In this paper, we describe the Disciplinary Commons project and identify some practical ideas which address central issues for teaching and learning of introductory programming that have emerged from it.
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The contract cheating industry, those services and individuals who are supplying students with original work for assessment, is evolving. Contract cheating companies are using enhanced marketing techniques, including social media... more
The contract cheating industry, those services and individuals who are supplying students with original work for assessment, is evolving. Contract cheating companies are using enhanced marketing techniques, including social media marketing, to encourage potential customers to avail themselves of services that breach academic integrity. Social media is proving to be integral to the success of the contract cheating industry as a whole. It allows contract cheating companies to recruit academic ghost writers and other staff. In addition, social media is fuelling a black market trade in contract cheating service accounts. Potential ghost writers who would not otherwise qualify are using this hidden market to get accounts to work for contract cheating services.This paper examines the state of the contract cheating industry, paying particular attention to the role that social media has played in the industry’s development and apparent growth. The discussion of the industry is supported by ...
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Student plagiarism is an ever-increasing problem for academic institutions. A growing number of students are using material from the Web in their submissions, without properly acknowledging the source. This paper reviews the need for... more
Student plagiarism is an ever-increasing problem for academic institutions. A growing number of students are using material from the Web in their submissions, without properly acknowledging the source. This paper reviews the need for widespread plagiarism detection systems and evaluates available Web based detection services. Four services are discussed: the Measure of Software Similarity (MOSS) service for program source code and the plagiarism.org, Integriguard and copycatch.com services for free-text submissions. The downloadable Essay Verification Engine (EVE) tool for free-text detection of Web plagiarism is also evaluated. The paper finds that all five could be invaluable resources for academic institutions as they strive for a pro-active anti-plagiarism policy. The paper concludes by looking at the authors' current work to combat plagiarism.
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The use of laboratory examinations to test students' practical programming skills is becoming more common in first programming courses, in particular to counter plagiarism and increase validity. In this paper, we outline and compare 7... more
The use of laboratory examinations to test students' practical programming skills is becoming more common in first programming courses, in particular to counter plagiarism and increase validity. In this paper, we outline and compare 7 such examination techniques used by members of the Disciplinary Commons project. The reliability, validity and scalability of the exams are assessed, highlighting the appropriateness of some methods for particular environments. Implicit costs as well as reported benefits are given.
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This paper reports on the South-East European Project on Policies for Academic Integrity (SEEPPAI) research study on academic integrity in higher education, which was conducted in Europe in late 2016. The study was funded by the Council... more
This paper reports on the South-East European Project on Policies for Academic Integrity (SEEPPAI) research study on academic integrity in higher education, which was conducted in Europe in late 2016. The study was funded by the Council of Europe. The data collection methods and results build upon the success of the Impact of Policies for Plagiarism in Higher Education across Europe (IPPHEAE). Conducted between 2010—2013, IPPHEAE explored how higher education institutions (HEIs) in 27 European Union member states were managing student plagiarism and academic misconduct. The SEEPPAI research covers six further countries in south-east Europe: Albania, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia, The former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia, Montenegro and Serbia. A mixed method research approach was adopted, utilising on-line questionnaires, student focus groups and interviews with senior managers and national policy advisers. Visits to the region to collect data also afforded the research team the ...
An increasing reliance on commercial tools for non-originality investigation of student submissions is taking academic integrity beyond its comfortable zone. There is no guarantee if such tools will continue to be available and, if they... more
An increasing reliance on commercial tools for non-originality investigation of student submissions is taking academic integrity beyond its comfortable zone. There is no guarantee if such tools will continue to be available and, if they are, that they will be available at a reasonable price. Further the technical underpinning of such tools is unclear and has not been made publicly available. This may present problems if subsequently an academic misconduct investigation is started. Moreover, existing tools may not be the best suited to any given circumstance.
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This paper will introduce the design and implementation of a suite of tools intended to assist in the detailed investigation of non-originality. Culwin & Lancaster's four stage model identifies the third stage, confirmation, as being... more
This paper will introduce the design and implementation of a suite of tools intended to assist in the detailed investigation of non-originality. Culwin & Lancaster's four stage model identifies the third stage, confirmation, as being the one where the synergy between human and computer is most crucial. The preceding stages, collection and analysis, can be largely automated and the succeeding stage, investigation, is non-tool dependant. Hence the major design intention in these tools has been to provide effective and efficient interactive representations of the similarity intersections of two, or more, documents. However, the tools also support the analysis phase. They are described as integrating rather than integrated as they were initially developed as a series of separate tools and are currently being packaged together. All tools are written 100% in Java and so are readily available on the Web for all environments. They are free of charge and descriptions of the precise algor...
The teaching of employability skills is now a key professional practice component of many Computing courses. However, students do not always consider the wide availability of information that exists about them on the Internet. Much of... more
The teaching of employability skills is now a key professional practice component of many Computing courses. However, students do not always consider the wide availability of information that exists about them on the Internet. Much of this information is not professional in nature. Relying on such undesirable online material can reduce their likelihood of success when students apply for job and industrial year placements. Instead, students need to have a Professional Online Presence containing positive information about them and making them appear desirable employees. This paper outlines and reviews the delivery of Professional Practice 2 UG2, a module available at Birmingham City University where the development and use of Professional Online Presences are taught and assessed. The success of students at creating Professional Online Presences is evaluated. Students are shown to benefit from this teaching, with increase of 19% in the number of students believing that they would be pe...
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This chapter reviews the issues associated with contract cheating, loosely defined as the outsourcing of student work to third parties. The chapter is intended to serve as an overview of current research, whilst also providing practical... more
This chapter reviews the issues associated with contract cheating, loosely defined as the outsourcing of student work to third parties. The chapter is intended to serve as an overview of current research, whilst also providing practical instruction and guidance to academics and educators. The discussion begins by introducing contract cheating and comparing this specific form of academic misconduct with student plagiarism. The suggestion is made that current anti-plagiarism methods are not suitable for contract cheating, defined as where a student is requesting an original bespoke piece of work to be created for them. Six types of services that students can use to have work produced for them are listed; these are: (1) essay writing services, (2) friends, family and other students, (3) private tutors, (4) copyediting services, (5) agency websites, (6) reverse classifieds. Specific challenges associated with each service are provided. Findings related to the wider contract cheating area are given. This includes particular discussion of the research into agency sites, where a student makes the offer of work available to large number of people who then bid to complete it. The student selects one of the bidders to complete the work based on a form of cost-benefit analysis. Issues considered include the extent of contract cheating, the cost and quality of outsourced work and the range of subjects in which students are cheating. The chapter concludes with a discussion of the main methods that can be used to prevent contract cheating. Research into technical solutions, such as stylometrics, put in place to find automated technical solutions to detect contract cheating, is also presented.
In this age of contract cheating, where students are paying and using third parties to complete their work, there are many educators who are advocating a return to assessment through tests and examinations. The standard argument is... more
In this age of contract cheating, where students are paying and using third parties to complete their work, there are many educators who are advocating a return to assessment through tests and examinations. The standard argument is usually that the level of examination security is such that the student alone is being tested and that an external body cannot be used to provide unacknowledged support for this process. Some academics seem to be have the view that the traditional type of assessment by examination is valued by employers more than coursework. However, opponents of assessment through examination note the restrictive form of this type of assessment, that many examination papers focus mainly on recall and memory and that examinations provide little opportunity for students to develop extended arguments and portfolio pieces. Assessment through examination does not seem to be the sole solution to contract cheating. This paper builds on previous work, mostly published in the for...
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The move to online teaching has brought with it fresh opportunities for students to violate academic integrity. This paper considers such violations from within the domain of online English language teaching, although many of the ideas... more
The move to online teaching has brought with it fresh opportunities for students to violate academic integrity. This paper considers such violations from within the domain of online English language teaching, although many of the ideas presented are applicable to other disciplines. The paper reports on a two-part study conducted at a university in Turkey. In the first part, qualitative data collected from students and staff through an online survey form were used to identify a new way of categorizing academic integrity violations. This provided three such categories, namely; exam-related, assignment-related, and online session-related violations. In the second part of the study, 462 students completed a survey related to their attitudes towards both academic integrity violations and the associated threats that may lead to these violations. Although the results revealed students generally presenting a commitment to the fundamental values of academic integrity, many students showed willingness to engage with machine translation software to prepare answers at times when they were expected to be working unaided. The findings underline a need for further consideration about how students are taught and assessed with integrity in an online environment. They also suggest that nuanced discussions about academic integrity need to take place between students and English language teachers.
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ABSTRACT The current economic climate where graduate vacancies are in decline overall and tuition fees have risen, has placed graduate employability high on the higher education agenda. Computing staff have, in particular, been criticised... more
ABSTRACT The current economic climate where graduate vacancies are in decline overall and tuition fees have risen, has placed graduate employability high on the higher education agenda. Computing staff have, in particular, been criticised for many years by their industrial colleagues and peers for lacking business, communication and interpersonal skills and for being focused on technology at the expense of being focused on business. As a consequence, gaining employability skills is considered to be of particular importance for Computing students. Work placements are seen as one key mechanism for improving graduate employability, yet there has been seen to be a decline in the uptake of industrial sandwich year placements by students. This paper presents the results of a survey of 116 HEIs (Higher Education Institutions), in order to determine the challenges faced by students in completing a placement year and to identify best practices used by HEIs in order to meet these challenges. These best practices can then be shared by HEIs across the UK. The paper concludes with the recommendation that HEIs need to better motivate and prepare students for taking up placements, and to work more closely with local and SME employers in order to create more placement opportunities.
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ABSTRACT During recent years UK Higher Education Institutions (HEIs) have faced increasing pressure to enhance the employability skills of students and graduates through such initiatives as sandwich year placements. The relationship... more
ABSTRACT During recent years UK Higher Education Institutions (HEIs) have faced increasing pressure to enhance the employability skills of students and graduates through such initiatives as sandwich year placements. The relationship between these industrial placements and the employability of students has been widely explored. The positive association between the two seems to be accepted by practitioners and educationalists alike. In order to support students with obtaining placements, HEIs need to provide students with work-preparation skills and learning resources. Provision for these should ideally include digital formats. This paper presents the results of an analysis of the content of 116 UK HEI websites. The study was intended to identify the placement information and learning resources available on the websites and focused towards the Computing discipline. Whilst 110 out of 116 (95%) HEIs provided general information about placements on their website, only 73 out of 116 (63%) provided a specific page for Computing. An analysis of the availability of placement learning resources also showed that this was very mixed across the sector. The paper is intended to share the best practice for the provision of online placement resources in use across UK HEIs. This approach can then be duplicated at a local HEI level to support students in the acquisition of placements and the gaining of work-experience.
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ABSTRACT The paper studies the use the RentACoder Web site to contract cheat by Computing students. RentACoder is an outsourcing service for computer work which operates under auction principles. Contract cheating is where students have... more
ABSTRACT The paper studies the use the RentACoder Web site to contract cheat by Computing students. RentACoder is an outsourcing service for computer work which operates under auction principles. Contract cheating is where students have assessed work completed for them on their behalf. The work is original, so not will be detected by the regular anti-plagiarism mechanisms that look for shared commonality. The paper describes the background to contract cheating and discusses a catalogue of 910 bid requests ...
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ABSTRACT Many forms of student plagiarism are detectable, providing that staff are given time, training and access to the most suitable Text Matching Tools. This chapter provides a background to how Text Matching Tools can be used to... more
ABSTRACT Many forms of student plagiarism are detectable, providing that staff are given time, training and access to the most suitable Text Matching Tools. This chapter provides a background to how Text Matching Tools can be used to support the entire educational process, from helping students to write better assignments, to finding students who are attempting to cheat their way to an academic qualification by using external sources, such as the web, without acknowledgement. The chapter begins with a brief review of how Text Matching Tools operate by finding common word patterns. Where these patterns exist across multiple pieces of student work, this generally indicates collusion. Alternatively the pattern may share form with other sources, indicating copying. The chapter continues by discussing how these Text Matching Tools can be integrated into the assessment process, providing some level of consistent indication when work submitted is not that of the expected student. Text Matching Tools can never be a “one-stop” solution to plagiarism. They do have limitations as to what sources they can find. The drawbacks of becoming reliant on Text Matching Tools are explored in the chapter. One underused feature of these tools is the role that they play in educating students and presenting plagiarism. Methods through which this can be accomplished are discussed. The chapter concludes by discussing emerging issues in tool supported plagiarism detection, such as the original work provided through contract cheating services. This is intended to inform academics about the challenges that lie ahead.
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ABSTRACT Getting students motivated within STEM subjects and beyond is essential to ensure that they perform well in their studies and become employable. This paper reports on a study working with students at Coventry University College... more
ABSTRACT Getting students motivated within STEM subjects and beyond is essential to ensure that they perform well in their studies and become employable. This paper reports on a study working with students at Coventry University College (CUC). The students were required to consider the technology that appealed to them, and how the use of that would improve their motivation to become successful learners. 209 students responded to the survey, 97 of whom were studying STEM subjects. This group of 97 included 78 students taking Science and Engineering and 19 studying Information Technology (IT). Within STEM, IT students were found to be much more accepting of technology than Science and Engineering students. 89% of students were found to own laptops and 80% owned smartphones, suggesting that delivery of materials using those technologies would be motivating. However, students themselves considered that they would become more motivated when using tablet computers for study. There were devices which only 25% of students said they owned and not reflective of the no frills style of education offered at CUC. Students also reported that they did not feel that the use of social media technology within education would improve their motivation. They wanted to keep their social and academic aspects of life separate. The paper concludes with recommendations provided by students to improve motivation, including increasing the uptake of materials delivered through the mediums of video and audio mediums. The need to apply these research findings to students on a local level is also noted, due to the unique features of the CUC programme of educational delivery.