Reassessing the Right Students Peter Tischer

The only way to defeat students who submit work which gets a high mark but who have not learned anything in producing this work is to interview the student to see what they have learned. We do not have the resources to interview every student but we can interview some students. Instead of taking a random sample we can try to concentrate on students who are most likely to have learned far less than the assessment mark would indicate.

There are two main ways we can identify these students. One way is via plagiarism checking. The other way if from the history of the student. The student may have infringed in the past and is under probation. Another history approach is that a student's performance in examinations might be very much worse than their assessment for practical work. The students often show that they may have got a high mark for practical work but that they also have not learned what they were expected to learn from doing the practical work.

Despite a culture of learning and assessment for learning, there always has been and will be some plagiarists. With the ease of plagiarism supported by the internet, unfortunately, professors, who ignore such plagiarism in work assessed for final grading, play into the hands of plagiarists. More importantly, they may also send the wrong signals to other students. However, without tools, detecting such plagiarism is very time consuming.

Systematic plagiarism detection is a deterrent for plagiarism, if students are aware that it is routinely performed on assignments submitted for marking. Especially, if assignments are not just compared within a class or year but against large databases holding many assignments over many years, assignments are much less likely to be recycled from one year to the next and passed on from one university to another.

The deterrence grows with the accuracy of detection and the variety and spread of material in the databases. Modifications capable of beating plagiarism detectors eventually require too much creativity, understanding or simply become too time consuming compared to actually learning. For example the algorithms used by the plagiarism.org service are claimed to increase the likelihood of detecting plagiarism when work from two or more texts are mixed and merged:

Interviews Martin Dick

To counter this we instituted assessment by interview. This has been done since. These are subjects with approx. 300 students and a corresponding number of tutors allocated to the subjects. The interviews are performed by tutors. Initial tutor training is part of package and parcel. It has in our opinion significantly dropped the amount of cheating and in most cases where cheating occurs results in a very much reduced mark or a fail for the student.

Two interviews are conducted which take on average between 30 and 40 minutes. Each tutor is allocated 2 hours of marking time per week or 26 hours in total for the subject for the semester. If we dropped interviews and did normal marking on the assignments, it would seem reasonable from my experience that to give the students appropriate written feedback, that the times would be roughly equivalent. Assessment by interview helps us in a number of ways

• reduces cheating by drastically reducing the advantage of cheating
• provides immediate and verbal feedback to students on their work
• helps the student to understand where they have gone wrong
• reduces the number of disputes over marks

Random Interviews David Squire

Some universities use random interviews scheduled at a fixed time each week. Let's say there is an all-day prac. each Thursday. Friday morning at 9:00am a list goes up of all the groups who will be interviewed that morning. The idea is that since you never know whether or not you will be interviewed, you always have to be prepared for it.