Plagiarism Control
How to support fair exams with plagiarism control
Plagiarism control is about protecting the integrity of your assessments. With the right tools in place, you can support your graders with the information they need to detect and address plagiarism at an early stage.
Plagiarism control is about protecting the integrity of your assessments.
Protecting the integrity of your exams
All assessment forms have a shared ambition: providing valid and reliable information about learners’ mastery of a subject. And, when the originality of work is in question, whether by intention or accidentally, we fail to meet that ambition. Plagiarism control is about ensuring fairness and protecting the integrity of your exams, and should be exercised in all assessments, whatever form or shape they may take.
Open book exams
Open book exams are perhaps most prone to plagiarism. This assessment form does not restrict learners’ access to materials, information, and other aids. Learners are assessed on their ability to synthesise, interpret, collect, and systematically analyse information that is readily available. However, the work submitted must be original.
Closed book exams
Even though closed book exams carry a lower risk, plagiarism may still compromise the integrity of your exams in some cases. Text excerpts and ready-made responses can be brought into exams or shared in myriad ways. No controls, whether it is physical invigilation or our dedicated digital monitoring toolbox, can ever guarantee a water-tight closed book exam.
Use your tool of choice
Inspera Assessment provides integrations for several user-defined plagiarism prevention services. This means that you can use the plagiarism tool of your own choice. However, whatever service you choose to use, we embed it into our platform in a way that makes plagiarism reports available to markers right when they need them.
Plagiarism reports
Inspera Assessment supports plagiarism reports for individual question responses or entire essay submissions. The results of the originality control are visible in the marker module, and are displayed on the marker dashboard while they assess essay- or question submissions.
Use plagiarism reports wisely
No marker can afford the time to go through the details of plagiarism reports for each and every exam submission. What is more, results can be interpreted differently by individual markers. That is why most institutions have defined clear policies on originality requirements, or on the degree of plagiarism allowed. With such policies in place, the Inspera platform’s quick report results make it easy for markers to decide if a submission requires further scrutiny. With one click, markers can access the full originality report and get all the details they need to make an informed decision about where to take the submission next.
Learn more
Do you want to learn more about how to conduct online exams and assessments, and how Inspera Assessment can make your assessments accessible, secure, valid and reliable? No worries, we wrote a “Guide to Online Exams and Assessments“.
Written by Jo Bowden
March 9, 2020
