Personalizing the assessments generated automatically for students in order to minimize plagiarism: the case of programming

S. Manoharan, “Personalized Assessment as a Means to Mitigate Plagiarism,” in IEEE Transactions on Education, vol. 60, no. 2, pp. 112-119, May 2017.
DOI: 10.1109/TE.2016.2604210.

Although every educational institution has a code of academic honesty, they still encounter incidents of plagiarism. These are difficult and time-consuming to detect and deal with. This paper explores the use of personalized assessments with the goal of reducing incidents of plagiarism, proposing a personalized assessment software framework through which each student receives a unique problem set. The framework not only auto-generates the problem set but also auto-marks the solutions when submitted. The experience of using this framework is discussed, from the perspective of both students and staff, particularly with respect to its ability to mitigate plagiarism. A comparison of personalized and traditional assignments in the same class confirms that the former had far fewer observed plagiarism incidents. Although personalized assessment may not be cost-effective in all courses (such as language courses), it still can be effective in areas such as mathematics, engineering, science, and computing. This paper concludes that personalized assessment is a promising approach to counter plagiarism.

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