Keynote Address - Detecting and Dealing with Plagiarism in 2012: A Complex Issue Requiring a Complex Response

Ms Jude Carroll (Educational Development Consultant, Oxford Brookes University, UK) pointed out in her keynote address “Detecting and Dealing with Plagiarism in 2012: A Complex Issue Requiring a Complex Response” that institutes of higher learning today have to deal with the new challenges brought on by technology. Plagiarism is no longer confined to print-based copying and increasingly, takes the form of electronic and networked finding, sharing and copying. With universities adopting coursework as one of the many types of assessment these days, there are now also more avenues for students to bypass the hard work of learning. To effectively manage plagiarism, she emphasised that it is critical that universities have a shared response with regard to this problem, and this necessarily means involvement and action at all three levels – institution, faculty members and students, in terms of taking on shared responsibility for strong academic values and scholarship.

Ms Carroll also proposed several ways in which universities can take on programme-level responsibility to raise awareness about the universities’ academic integrity policy. Amongst many others, they include leveraging multiple information channels and platforms to deliver programmes to educate and inform students about plagiarism; providing faculty members and students opportunities for interaction and discussion to ensure understanding; providing students many practice opportunities to distinguish between plagiarism and scholastic acknowledgement; and teaching them how to make references and acknowledgements in a proper, standard and accepted way.