Strategies for Maintaining Academic Integrity in First-Year Computing Courses
Abstract
Safeguarding academic integrity is an issue of concern to all computing academics due to high and rising levels of plagiarism and other cheating in computing courses. There have been many studies of the cheating and plagiarism practices of computing students and the factors that can influence these practices, and a variety of strategies for reducing cheating have been proposed. This national study of first-year computing programs provides insights into what strategies computing academics use to discourage or prevent their students from cheating. Having interviewed 30 academics from 25 universities we found 21 different types of strategy, which we classified into five themes: education; discouraging cheating; making cheating difficult; and empowerment. We also found that academics often employ strategies across all of these themes.
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- Authors
- Sheard, J., Simon, Butler, M., Falkner, K., Morgan, M., & Weerasinghe, A.
- Affiliations
- Monash University (AU)
- University of Newcastle Australia (AU)
- The University of Adelaide (AU)
- Venue
- Proceedings of the 2017 ACM Conference on Innovation and Technology in Computer Science Education
- Publisher
- ACM
- Published
- 2017-06-28
- Pages
- 244-249
- OpenAlex
- W2727765388
- Cited by
- 98
- References
- 22
- Citations by year
- 2026: 2 · 2025: 3 · 2024: 9 · 2023: 13 · 2022: 10 · 2021: 6 · 2020: 9 · 2019: 39 · 2018: 4 · 2017: 3
- FWCI
- 37.48
- Type
- conference paper
- Language
- en
- Open access
- closed
- Locations
- ACM Conference on Innovation and Technology in Computer Science Education (ITiCSE) (publishedVersion)
- NOVA (University of Newcastle Australia) (submittedVersion)
- Funders
- Australian Council of Deans of ICT (Commissioned reports)
- Topics
- Social Sciences › Safety Research › Academic integrity and plagiarism
- Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Information Systems › Information Systems Education and Curriculum Development
- Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Computer Science Applications › Teaching and Learning Programming
- Keywords
- academic integrity, cheating prevention, plagiarism, computing education, student empowerment
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