Detecting Plagiarism in MS Access Assignments.
2013; Volume: 24; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês
ISSN
2186-3679
Autores Tópico(s)Software Engineering Research
Resumo1. INTRODUCTION Plagiarism in assignments and tests is pervasive in universities (Etter, Cramer, & Finn, 2006; Jones, Reid, & Bartlett, 2005; Molnar, Kletke, & Chongwatpol, 2008) and therefore tackling plagiarism is critical (McLafferty & Foust, 2004). While instructors can demand paper-based tests/assignments in non-technical courses, digital submissions are often necessary when work using technology such as spreadsheets or databases is being evaluated. Digital submissions, however, make it easier for students to plagiarize. All a student needs to do is make a copy of a completed assignment and submit it as his/her own. The challenge for instructors lies in not only detecting plagiarism but also obtaining digital proof of plagiarism. While many commercial tools such as Turnitin (Chao, Wilhelm, & Neureuther, 2009) and SafeAssign enable instructors to check for commonality among submissions, they are ineffective when the answers are expected to be the same. Furthermore, such tools are primarily intended for detecting plagiarism in MS Word or text documents. They do not work with other formats such as Microsoft Access that are not textual in nature (McCart & Jarman, 2008). To address plagiarism in non-text format, researchers have attempted to create detection tools specific to each technology. For example, Singh, Mangalaraj, & Taneja (2012) used Macros to detect plagiarism in MS Excel assignments; McCart & Jarman (2008) tested the effectiveness of a technological tool developed in Visual Basic for Applications that compared database properties to look for plagiarism in MS Access assignments; Joy & Luck (1999) compared lexical content and structural content to detect plagiarism in source code of programming assignments. This paper showcases a simple method that relies on data macros, a new feature in Microsoft Access 2010, to detect plagiarism in MS Access assignments. The method proposed in this paper is simpler when compared to the one proposed by McCart & Jarman (2008) in two ways. First, this method relies on digital watermarks implicitly created by the user and hence allows common data object names and database properties in assignments; this is useful when the instructor expects the same response from the students after they perform a set of tasks. Second, this method does not need dedicated software to detect plagiarism; it simply relies on built-in features of MS Access to provide evidence of plagiarism. 2. ARTIFACT Microsoft Access 2010 is a relational database system with a graphical user-interface. This version has many new tools such as data macros that can be leveraged to make powerful databases. Being part of Microsoft Office, Microsoft Access 2010 is readily available to instructors and is used widely to introduce students to database concepts (Adams, Granger, Goelman, & Ricardo, 2004). Data Macros are available in Microsoft Access 2010 and 2013. 3. METHOD This section describes, with an example, the proposed method of detecting and documenting plagiarism. Students are given a pre-populated database containing many tables and are required to work on some of these tables to create queries, reports and forms as indicated in the assignment. As part of the assignment, students are required to replace the first and last name of a specific employee in the EMPLOYEES table with their own first name and last name. The data macro created by the instructor, as detailed below, records these changes in hidden columns in one of the unused tables. If the assignment changes hands with student's replacing the earlier students' name with their own name, the unused table will reveal the name of each student involved in plagiarism. The process involves simple steps that are to be taken before giving the assignment file to the students and after receiving the completed assignment file from the students. Before giving the assignment file to the students, complete the following steps: 1. …
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