Jun 2004 - Volume 3 Issue 2
Papers
- Jon Dron and Judith Masthoff - An Online Alternative to Formal Course Meetings
- Raymond Flood, Bob Lockhart and Pete Thomas - Modalities and Learning in Computer Science
- Tony Jenkins - The First Language - A Case for Python?
- Norman Powell, David Moore, John Gray, Janet Finlay and John Reaney - Dyslexia and Learning Computer Programming
Editorial by Alan Poulter
University of Strathclyde
One part of my daily commute to work is a quick scan of the freebie newspaper that gets left on every seat on the train. Normally there is nothing much in it but last Friday was an exception. ‘Student sues University’ was the headline. In case you missed it a student is suing his University for not warning him about plagiarism early enough! He was failed in his Final Year for plagiarism, which he freely admits to. However his argument is that he passed earlier assignments with plagiarised work, so why didn’t academics spot it and warn him then? I also discovered recently that my university will not allow the use of the JISC Plagiarism Detection Service, as it involves external upload of student work. Since other universities make use of the service I fail to see what makes mine different.
Something is very wrong here. If there is a problem with plagiarism then universities as a whole ought to take concerted action to stop it, with a standard programme of prevention, detection and punishment. I see no sign of this, with individual universities, faculties and departments all taking different stances. No wonder then that a student can try to legally extricate himself from a failure due to plagiarism against a background of inconsistent practice.
