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Assignment Topic:
Plagiarism

Assignment Question:
To what extent is plagiarism a solvable problem?

Source:
Walker, M. and Townley, C., (2012) ‘Contract cheating: a new challenge for academic honesty?’ Journal of Academic Ethics, 10(1), pp.27-44.

Brief Summary:

This article describes the recently form of academic dishonesty called ‘contract cheating’, where students outsource commercial companies, usually using websites, in order to obtain original material for their assignments and delivered as their own work.  It draws attention to the difficulty of detection for educators as plagiarism software will not detect the original piece of work. It highlights how the form of deception involved in contract cheating arguably makes it more fraudulent than other forms of plagiarism and discuss the practical difficulties pursuing legal action against these companies. The paper also provides empirical information on reasons for cheating and mention casual factors that could motivate contract cheating as well as plagiarism.  The author concludes giving some prevention measures in order to reduce plagiarism and encouraging more support on the skills students need to honestly perform their work.

Evaluation:
The author mentions several definitions about the term ‘contract cheating’ that in some cases it could result confusing for the reader as the article mentions that institutions will probably address the concept just as plagiarism. Furthermore, the article mentions surveys taken at Duke University where there was no distinction between the forms of academic dishonesty. The article also does not consider any legal action against custom essay companies who helps students to cheat. A limitation of the research is that the survey sample of the reasons to plagiarise was restricted to 56 students from a Melbourne university, so their conclusions might not represent all cases.

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Assignment Topic:
Plagiarism

Essay Question: To what extent is plagiarism a solvable problem?

Source:
Lancaster, T., (2019) ‘Profiling the international academic ghost writers who are providing low-cost essays and assignments for the contract cheating industry’. Journal of Information, Communication and Ethics in Society, 17(1), pp. 72-86.

Brief Summary: This article focuses on showing how ghostwriters do this business. For this study we review the platform called fiver.com, where ghostwriters offer their services. We analyse the information in their advertisements, the different prices they charge for writing an essay and even what their customers think.  It also analyses the countries from which these scam providers originate or operate.  In conclusion, this article shows you how this type of industry operates and how much information is known about ghostwriters.

Evaluation: This article is a study that has limited itself to researching the providers of contract cheating and the resources they use to engage in this activity.

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Assignment Topic:
Plagiarism

Assignment Question:
To what extent is plagiarism a solvable problem?

Source:
Walker, M. and Townley, C., (2012) ‘Contract cheating: a new challenge for academic honesty?’ Journal of Academic Ethics, 10(1), pp.27-44.

Brief Summary:
This article reviews the concept of “contract cheating” and how it constitutes academic dishonesty. The authors argue that this form of plagiarism is more fraudulent than others and more difficult to detect. The authors also state that the problem of contract cheating is related to systemic problems within modern higher education. The article discusses the problems that derive from contract cheating, its causes and possible solutions, though it is acknowledged that some of these may be problematic. Finally, it is suggests that any response to the issue should be mainly focussed on the support of hones students and good academic practices.

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Assignment Topic:
Assignment Question:
Source: Maxwell, A., Curtis, G.J. and Vardanega, L., (2008) ‘Does culture influence understanding and perceived seriousness of plagiarism?’ International Journal for Educational Integrity, 4(2), pp. 25-40.
Brief Summary: This paper discusses and compares the perception, understanding and comprehension of the seriousness of plagiarism among 267 students from 2 different cultures, Asian international students in Australia. According to the results, the authors found that there are some differences about the perception of plagiarism related to the culture, but most of them can recognise the plagiarism. Also they mention that international students that speaks a second language may find challenging paraphrase text without losing the main idea because they don´t have enough grammar knowledge and thats why some students plagiarize without intention.
Evaluation: A limitation for this research is that there are not one side concluding if culture has a significative impact or not and at the end they mention the responsibilities of institutes to teach good practices to reduce plagiarism.

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Assignment topic: Plagiarism

Assignment question: To what extent is plagiarism a solvable problem?

Source: Michalska, A., (2014) ‘European students’ voices on plagiarism and academic practices.’ Available at: http://marketing-porg-statamic-assets-us-west-2.s3.amazonaws.com/main/Michalska_paper.pdf

Brief summary: This research focuses on the perspective that students from different cultural backgrounds have on plagiarism, and in this case students from different parts of Europe participated. The author argues that the topic of plagiarism possesses great complexity, and its understanding depends on factors such as cultural background, hierarchy of values and inconsistent plagiarism policies across different institutions.

Evaluation: There is a limitation in this research. The participants were Higher Education students, and the author acknowledged the issue with this because the majority of the discussion about this matter has been conducted in this level of education.

# data[].attributes.body
| Assignment Topic: |  Plagiarism
| Assignment Question: |  To what extent is plagiarism a solvable problem?

| Source: |  Michalska, A., (2014) ‘European students’ voices on plagiarism and academic practices.’ Available at:
http://marketing-porg-statamic-assets-us-west-2.s3.amazonaws.com/main/Michalska_paper.pdf
| Brief Summary: | This article discusses the issue of plagiarism in Higher Education seen from the perspective of students from diverse European countries. Using qualitative methods of data collection, such as focus groups and interviews.  In the focus groups, most of the students talked freely about their experiences and attitudes towards dishonest academic behaviour, sharing their opinions with the researcher. In summary, most students understood the concept of plagiarism and were fully aware of its meaning. As a result, Students from different cultural backgrounds have different value systems, teaching and learning methods also vary. All these factors influence their decision to commit plagiarism, as they are not aware of other perspectives and only rely on their own.
| Evaluation: |  As the authors point out the effectiveness of the qualitative analysis developed, this article shows that there are different issues that affected the behaviour of students in academic environment. Then if they chose plagiarise will be for the limited information and knowledge about the topic, then a possible solution to the problem will be encourage the discussion of plagiarism and how students can avoid it.