Senior Student Affairs Officers (SSAOs) play an important role in post-secondary institutions ensuring their institutions’ policies, goals and strategic plans are respected while simultaneously supporting students’ academic and campus life needs. Their work is complex, challenging and constantly changing; the decisions they make can impact reputations, academic careers and the integrity of programs and institutions. It would be assumed, then, that the literature is replete with first-hand accounts of how SSAOs do their jobs, what skills they need, and what tools they use. Surprisingly, this is not the case. While the literature is not lacking research about the profession generally, it has limited personal accounts by practitioners describing the work they do, and how they make their complex decisions. This dissertation addresses this issue by presenting a first hand account of my work as a SSAO. In addition to a commitment to add to the student affairs literature base, the purpose of this study was to develop a decision-making model that would provide a structure to my practice and guide a process to develop consistent and fair courses of action. I began the task by reviewing existing decision-making models and making a series of adaptations that would create a framework that would be useful in my decision-making efforts. I then constructed four vignettes, exemplifying the types of issues I encounter in my role as a SSAO. Each vignette was used sequentially to test and critique the decision-making framework thereby indicating places where refinements were needed. The first three vignettes were instrumental in illustrating and exposing the shortcomings of the framework. The fourth vignette provided a scenario that challenged the model and suggested where limitations lie not just in the framework, but also in the work of SSAOs. The end result of this iterative process is a refined two-stage decision-making framework. This work has added to the literature of the student affairs profession; it provides a much needed tool, a decision-making framework that can assist practitioners in their role of providing consistent and fair decisions in an environment fraught with change and uncertainties. / Education, Faculty of / Educational Studies (EDST), Department of / Graduate

Systems and tools that finds similarities among essays and reports are widely used by todays universities and schools to detect plagiarism. Such tools are however insufficient when used for source code comparisons since they are fragile to the most simplest forms of diguises. Other methods that analyses intermediate forms such as token strings, syntax trees and graph representations have shown to be more effective than using simple textual matching methods. In this master thesis report we discuss how program dependence graphs, an abstract representation of a programs semantics, can be used to find similar procedures. We also present an implementation of a system that constructs approximated program dependence graphs from the abstract syntax tree representation of a program. Matching procedures are found by testing graph pairs for either sub-graph isomorphism or graph monomorphism depending on whether structured transfer of control has been used. Under a scenario based evaluation our system is compared to Moss, a popular plagiarism detection tool. The result shows that our system is more or least as effective than Moss in finding plagiarized procedured independently on the type of modifications used. / System och verktyg som hittar likheter mellan uppsatser och rapporter används i stor omfattning av dagens universitet och skolor för att hitta plagiat bland studenters inlämningar. Sådana verktyg är dock otillräckliga när de används för att jämföra programkod eftersom de är svaga mot de enklaste formerna av modifikationer. Andra metoder som analyserar mellanstegsformer såsom tokensträngar, syntaxträd och grafrepresentationer har visat sig vara mer effektiva än att använda sig av enkla textuella metoder. I denna examensuppsats diskuterar vi hur programberoendegrafer, en abstrakt representation av en programs semantik, kan användas för att hitta jämförelsevis liknande procedurer. Vi presenterar också ett system som konstruerar approximerade programberoendegrafer från det abstrakta syntaxträdet av ett program. Matchande procedurer hittas genom att testa grafpar för antingen sub-graf isomorfism eller monomorfism beroende på om strukturerad byte av kontrolflöde har använts. I en scenariobaserad utvärdering jämför vi vårt system mot Moss, ett populärt verktyg för att detektera plagiat. Resultaten visar att vårt system är lika eller mer effektivt som Moss att detektera plagierade procedurer oberoende av de typer av modifikationer som använts.

Most of the existing plagiarism detection systems compare a text to a database of other texts. These external approaches, however, are vulnerable because texts not contained in the database cannot be detected as source texts. This paper examines an internal plagiarism detection method that uses style markers from authorship attribution studies in order to find stylistic changes in a text. These changes might pinpoint plagiarized passages. Additionally, a new style marker called specific words is introduced. A pre-study tests if the style markers can fingerprint an author s style and if they are constant with sample size. It is shown that vocabulary richness measures do not fulfil these prerequisites. The other style markers - simple ratio measures, readability scores, frequency lists, and entropy measures - have these characteristics and are, together with the new specific words measure, used in a main study with an unsupervised approach for detecting stylistic changes in plagiarized texts at sentence and paragraph levels. It is shown that at these small levels the style markers generally cannot detect plagiarized sections because of intra-authorial stylistic variations (i.e. noise), and that at bigger levels the results are strongly a ected by the sliding window approach. The specific words measure, however, can pinpoint single sentences written by another author.

This diploma thesis introduces the definition of plagiarism, distinguishes the types of plagiaries which often take place in praxis and the ways of determining the suspected texts. The means of detection are essential; therefore a whole chapter is dedicated to those. For the detection purposes, it is vital to pre-process the data to reduce the demand factor of the program. There is a preview of some programs which are already being used for the detection of plagiarism. The following chapter introduces some selected indications which have been implemented in the Matlab environment to create a detector of plagiaries in text documents. The created program is described in chapter eight. The applied indications and the detector response are described in a chapter called Indications testing. The testing proved the quality of these indications. The results together with pros and cons of the particular methods are discussed in the conclusion.

Source code plagiarism detection tools have been readily available for use in academia and industry for a long time. While there are many motivations for the usage of these tools in Computer Science education, they are often not implemented on an institutional level. This thesis will describe an efficient process of using source code plagiarism detec-tion tools in academia today. A literature review and a survey will be used to describe the process of finding source code plagiarism. A survey will collect some attitudes of instructors that affect the qualitative concept of efficiency. An interview with respondents using a tool integrated in a learning management system will collect more attitudes regarding efficiency. The administration of source code plagiarism detection tools will be analyzed. The process can be divided into collection, analysis, confirmation, and investigation. Some stages can be fully or partly automated with human intervention. Without integration into a learning management system, the efficiency already gained in the collection stage by using a learning management system will be lost. Some respondents were satisfied with the process of finding source code plagiarism without using any tool. The motivations of using plagiarism detection tools differ among respondents, but they shared positive attitudes of using a tool and using it more often. An efficient process is a university with a plagiarism policy that seeks plagiarism automatically without prior suspicion, using a tool integrated in a learning management system or a repository, with similarity reports of good usability.

All professional organizations that have a publication component should have a strongly articulated position against plagiarism. Such a position has a solid foundation in common understandings of ethical principles including the encouragement of honesty and the discouragement of stealing. Having a strong, ethical position against plagiarism is different from the implementation of a strong, enforceable policy against plagiarism. This paper examines some practical challenges to enforcement policies, including legal liability. These challenges may complicate the development of a broad, enforceable policy against plagiarism that includes sanctions against authors found to be plagiarists. Additionally, such sanctions are needed to deter authors from submitting plagiarized works. One important aspect of discouraging plagiarism is a better use of computer applications that detect copying. Authors can use these applications to avoid unintentional plagiarism; reviewers and publishers can use these applications to keep plagiarized articles from being published.

The researcher of this quasi-experimental 2 x 2 factorial design study investigated the impact of an academic integrity module and Turnitin on undergraduate student similarity index scores. Similarity index scores were used to measure suggested plagiarism rates of student papers. The purposive sample was made up of 96 undergraduate education students enrolled in four sections of the same course in a Southeastern university. One main factor was submitting assignments through Turnitin, with two levels: yes or no. The second factor was completing the academic integrity module, with two levels: yes or no. The four intact groups were randomly assigned to the main factors. Although the findings from this study indicated that neither main factor nor their interaction were statistically significant at the .05 alpha level, the mean similarity index score of participants who submitted their paper through Turnitin was lower than the mean similarity index score of participants who did not submit their papers through Turnitin. Similarly, the mean similarity index score of participants who completed the academic integrity module was lower than the mean similarity index score of participants who did not complete the academic integrity module. Although not at the statistically significant level, the plagiarism rate as measured by the mean similarity index score of the group of participants who completed the academic integrity module and submitted papers through Turnitin was the lowest followed by the group of participants that completed the academic integrity module but did not submit papers through Turnitin, then the group of participants that did not complete the academic integrity module and did not submit papers through Turnitin. The group of participants who did not complete the academic integrity module but submitted papers through Turnitin had the highest mean similar index score suggesting a higher plagiarism rate as compared to the other groups. Finally, the researcher acknowledged the limitations of this study and made recommendations for future consideration. Other variables such as gender, demographics, major, and credit hours completed could be investigated. Replication of the study is recommended. Also, a qualitative approach could enhance future studies.

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The purpose of this study is to gain insight on how art teacher’s reason about what is “plagiarism” in the subject of art. This study focus on how different art teacher´s reason on the boundaries of plagiarism. What are the rules of duplicating an image before it is looked upon as plagiarism? The five interviewed teachers refer in its reasoning to the main curriculum and the rules of copyright; they also support the negative view of the plagiarism in the world of art.The theory of originality is a theory that deals with the vision of the originality in contemporary time. It is a theory that opposes the romanticism view on the original and question the traditional approach to the artist's ability to create out of nothing. This theory combined with the main curriculum and the rules of copyright are used in this study to analyze teachers' approach and way of thinking about the boundaries of plagiarism in art class in upper secondary level. The results show that the teachers consider this topic to be complicated, and think differently about the restrictions.Keywords: art

Plagiarism in programming assignments has been a problem for a long time, and while the schools try to stop it, it is an ever ongoing game of cat and mouse between students and the schools. When students find new ways to hide their plagiarism, others develop new tools to find it again. This thesis looks specifically at plagiarism in entry level coding assignments, where the code is usually much simpler, and if it is possible to use the structure of the program code to detect plagiarism. The structural properties chosen is the abstract syntax tree for the code along with the codes call graph. The syntax tree contains the programs general structure and the call graphs are used in an attempt to find plagiarism where plagiarized code has been split up in smaller parts. For comparison a well established algorithm called MOSS is used. The results shows that the abstract syntax tree and call graph can be used to identify plagiarism, but it seems it is not worth the additional effort needed to use algorithms based on program structure, as it seems the plagiarism done for these assignments is quite simplistic. Additional research should instead be done to find out more on how students actually cheat in these entry level assignments and develop methods to counter those specifically. / Plagiering i programmeringsuppgifter i skolan har varit ett problem under lång tid. Skolorna försöker stoppa det men det är en ständigt pågående katt och råtta-lek mellan skolorna och eleverna. När studenterna hittar nya sätt att dölja plagiat så skapar någon annan nya metoder för att upptäcka det. Den här rapporten kommer att fokusera specifikt på plagiering i instegsuppgifter för programmering, där programmen oftast är mycket enklare och om det är möjligt att använda programstrukturen i dessa för att upptäcka plagiat. De strukturella egenskaper som används är programmens abstrakta syntaxträd och anropsgrafer. Syntaxträdet innehåller programmets generella struktur och anropsgraferna används för att försöka hitta plagiat där den plagierade programkoden har delats upp i mindre delar. Som jämförelsealgoritm används en väletablerad algoritm som kallas MOSS. Resultaten visar att det är möjligt att använda det abstrakta syntaxträdet och anropsgrafen för att upptäcka plagiering, men det verkar inte vara värt det extra arbete som krävs för att implementera algoritmer baserade på strukturella egenskaper. Detta då de plagiat som gjorts för dessa uppgifter är simpla. Mer forskning bör istället fokusera på exakt hur studenter fuskar i dessa uppgifter och utveckla metoder för att specifikt upptäcka dessa.