BBC News reports on how students are using new ways to cheat which are more difficult to detect:
Universities warn that students who cheat by commissioning essays from other students are proving harder to catch than other types of plagiarism.
Students are using websites to outsource their essays – inviting other students to put forward their most competitive bids for the work.
What this means is that this work is original and new and can not be easily identified by staff or specialist plagarism software such as Turnitin.
Robert Clarke, a lecturer at Birmingham City University, has identified 4,000 sales on a small number of websites.
Unlike other copied work, he says it is hard for plagiarism software to detect.
“The difficulty is that it is original work – it’s just not the original work of the student handing in the assignment,” says Mr Clarke, principal lecturer in the Department of Computing.
There are no easy solutions to this, though we may need to start re-thinking how we assess students, if traditional models of assessment can be easily circumvented using these auction sites.
The Government is going to scrap the LSC in plans announced in a White Paper.
The government’s £10.4bn skills agency, the Learning and Skills Council, is to be closed down – with most of the funds to be transferred to local authorities.
The plans have been announced by the government in a White Paper setting out the funding mechanism for the raising of the school leaving age to 18.
Local authorities will now be responsible for commissioning courses and training for older teenagers.
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