Pre-master students at spatial sciences will be taught a class about what plagiarism actually is, and why it’s not allowed. During the Covid pandemic, it turned out this group of students doesn’t know very much about the subject.
The Faculty of Spatial Sciences saw a marked rise in students cheating on exams during the Covid pandemic. The number went from just a few to more than sixty. But upon closer inspection, it turned out these cases didn’t involve cheating at all.
According to Erik Meijles, secretary of the board of examiners at the faculty, there were so many alerts because lecturers were using the anti-plagiarism software a little too forcefully. Before, they hardly used the plagiarism scanner at all, and now they used it all the time.
Sharing notes
Any suspicious similarities in answers could be explained by students preparing for the exam together or sharing notes.
‘Sometimes they’d copied phrasing from lecturers that they’d written down during an open-book exam. This is what led to the similar answers. But does that constitute plagiarism?’ Meijles wonders. ‘These are complicated discussions.’
Mandatory
At the same time, it turned out that very few students actually know that citing their sources is mandatory and that they’re committing plagiarism if they don’t. ‘Especially students who transferred into the pre-master programme from a university of applied sciences’, says Meijles. ‘We can’t really blame them for that.’
That’s why the faculty has started teaching extra classes on citation. The board of examiners has also amended the exam regulations to make it clear that copying an answer doesn’t always constitute plagiarism.