Student voice 4

What can a tutor do about a situation like this? Well, if you do not notice the work has been 'lifted' from another source, you cannot do anything. Of course, in language work, the quality of the language is often a real give-away, unless the student has been very clever in integrating it with his or her own work. However, even if you do notice something is not right, it can be very difficult to prove unless you happen to be able to locate the source. With Web material, much work has been undertaken into the development of plagiarism software that can help locate Web sources with relative ease. Unfortunately, most plagiarism is still from books and other printed materials and the source is then much harder to locate. If you suspect it has been copied but cannot locate the source and the student denies any wrongdoing, there is little you can do other than to issue a warning.

In fact, it is much better to start at the other end. The only effective solution to the problem of plagiarism is to reduce the likelihood of it occurring by being careful about the type of task you set. For example, with coursework essays, do not set too obvious a title, such as 'Discuss the pros and cons of the EU', but give it a specific slant - eg 'In what way does your home town benefit from belonging to the EU? Are there any ways it does not benefit from membership?'

To avoid students getting help with assessed language exercises (eg from international students or others), the best solution is to organize major assessments as open-book exercises under controlled conditions (see section 13.2.2). Here students are allowed access to any reference works they want but are supervised throughout and not allowed to talk to other students. For essays, they might be given the topics in advance and allowed to bring key texts with them. While removing unfairness, this would stop short of formal exam conditions, except for the time constraint. This is indeed a solution suggested by students themselves in Schmidt and O'Dochartaigh's survey of student views on assessment (2001: 28-29).

The key thing to remember is that cheating is demotivating for other students and it is our professional duty to do everything we can to make it as difficult as possible.

For further ideas on tackling plagiarism, see Stefani and Carroll (2001) and Atkinson (2002: 1.4). See also the following websites: Culwin and Lancaster (2001), Van Bremmer (1995), the JISC project on electronic plagiarism detection (JISC, 2001).