University puts cheats to shame

Melanie Swan

• Last Updated: November 22. 2009 12:41AM UAE / November 21. 2009 8:41PM GMT

Universities looking to tackle cheating and plagiarism by students are increasingly turning to computer programs that can detect the dishonest practices.

Although there are few statistics available to gauge the extent of the problem, a study last year by Dr Donald McCabe, a professor at Rutgers University in the US, found that, out of 2,600 students at Zayed University, many admitted to cheating and felt able to justify it.

Timothy Walters, the head of the mass communication and marketing departments at the American University of Sharjah (AUS), conducted his own informal research while teaching at Zayed in 2006.

He asked 200 students 120 questions on a variety of subjects, and found 60 per cent of them admitted to cheating.

“A lot of it has to do with helping family members,” he said.

“So it isn’t viewed as cheating necessarily. We have never really been sure if people here really knew what cheating was, though.”

Zayed University now uses SafeAssign, a computer software being used in more than 100 countries and available in several languages, including French, German and Chinese.

AUS uses another program, called iLearn, and offers SafeAssign to everyone on campus. The anti-cheating software is available to all faculty members and employed by everyone in the mass communications and marketing department at AUS.

Use of the software had increased over the past year, said Mr Walters, resulting in a “large reduction” in the amount of cheating. Students seemed to be grasping the severity of cheating and the penalties that could be invoked, he added.

“These warnings are built into syllabi. We have strict standards,” Mr Walters said.

Hania Hashef, an English instructor, uses the software on a daily basis in her writing course.

“The [student] documents are checked against papers of other students, professors, web documents and so on, and a detailed report is given showing the percentage of plagiarism, if any,” she said.

Susan Jones, a lecturer at Zayed for 11 years, said more than half of the university’s 400 staff in Abu Dhabi and Dubai were now using the anti-cheating technology daily, with more turning to it each term.

So far, the use of the software had proved a successful deterrent, and appeared to be changing attitudes towards cheating among students, she said.

“The definition of what is considered cheating is a difficult issue here, socially and culturally,” she said.

“Students will help each other. There is a lot of pressure to ‘help’ people when they ask, but this is slowly becoming slightly clearer.”

Students now knew that they could not simply submit another student’s work, said Ms Jones.

After students hand in their work, it is run through programs such as SafeAssign.

The software analyses the work for anything that might be lifted from another source or paraphrased. Anything not attributed is flagged.

At the Higher Colleges of Technology, which also uses software to flag cheating, Tim March, a long-time educator and former English language teacher at HCT, said the strategy was proving effective.

Students, he said, had decided that cheating was less acceptable than it used to be.

mswan@thenational.ae