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ChatGPT, a new, easily accessible, and user-friendly artificial intelligence (AI) platform, as well as other emerging AI platforms, allow for the creation of well-crafted essays complete with citations, and quickly and mostly correct answers to multiple-choice questions. These types of platforms pose significant concerns for academic programs, including environmental health, as much of the students' learning is guided by written assignments. Academic integrity is an educational and professional attribute and breaches of ethical conduct risk the reputations of organizations and by association, those who work in them. To address this threat, the Environmental Health Community of Practice (CoP)--a group of academic professionals in environmental health from across the globe--has developed potential approaches to address AI within the academic and professional realms of environmental health.
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This commentary takes note of the existence of "tortured phrases" (i.e. unspecific jargon or confusing alternative phrases), as indexed in the Tortured Phrases Detector of the Problematic Paper Screener (PPS) (sourced on January 10, 2023) in 213 preprints, 13 of which are related to COVID-19. Select "tortured phrases" in 11 preprints are highlighted, to offer readers an appreciation of this phenomenon. The incorrect representation of jargon in the medical and health literature may risk confusing readers by reducing the impact of effective and precise communication. Whereas some "tortured phrases" might represent simple mistranslations, in other cases, an abundance of such terms in a single preprint might reveal a more serious ethical issue, such as the undeclared use of a paper mill or an unprofessional editing service. This commentary is thus only a spring-board to introduce this linguistic phenomenon and to encourage interested academics to explore more cases, the practical implications of their existence, and even the weaknesses and strengths of PPS. Caution is needed about excessive extrapolation of the existence of "tortured phrases", so as not to automatically associate them with ethical infractions or misconduct.
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COVID-19 , Humans , Research PersonnelABSTRACT
With the spread of the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19), online education has been increasingly adopted globally. However, whether the online teaching approach is effective for students' learning engagement and motivation is still an open question. To improve students' learning engagement and motivation to minimize students' indulgent in procrastination and plagiarism behavior, an experimental case study on forum-based online teaching was carried out. Results showed that compared to traditional class teaching, the forum-based online teaching effectively improved students' learning engagement and motivation as well as reduced procrastination and plagiarism. Although some students are emotionally resistant to this new forum-based online teaching method, most of the students believed their presentation and other academic skills could be improved through forum-based online teaching. Moreover, students generally accepted moderate levels of peer pressure and competition that were created by the forum-based learning process. Therefore, forum-based online teaching can be considered as a useful complementary approach to traditional class teaching. The implications of this study include that breaking a final "term paper" into multiple small online submissions helps students proactively complete homework assignments and avoids plagiarism. Moreover, educators integrate theories into students' life experiences through online teaching forums, which also improve student learning engagement and motivation. [ FROM AUTHOR] Copyright of Interactive Learning Environments is the property of Routledge and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full . (Copyright applies to all s.)
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Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, we were forced to conduct two exams for a database course as online exams. An essential part of the exams was to write non-trivial SQL queries for given tasks. In order to ensure that cheating has a certain risk, we used several techniques to detect cases of plagiarism. One technique was to use a kind of "watermarks” in variants of the exercises that are randomly assigned to the students. Each variant is marked by small discrimination points that need to be included in submitted solutions. Those markers might go through undetected when a student decides to copy a solution from someone else. In this case, the student would reveal to know a "secret” that he cannot know without the forbidden communication with another student. This can be used as a proof for plagiarism instead of just a subjective feeling about the likelihood of similar solutions without communication. We also used a log of SQL queries that were tried during the exam. © 2023 Gesellschaft fur Informatik (GI). All rights reserved.
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Teachers need a technique to efficiently understand the learning effects of their students. Early warning prediction mechanisms constitute one solution for assisting teachers in changing their teaching strategies by providing a long-term process for assessing each student's learning status. However, current methods of building models necessitate an excessive amount of data, which is not conducive to the final effect of the model, and it is difficult to collect enough information. In this paper, we use educational data mining techniques to analyze students' homework data and propose an algorithm to extract the three main features: Degree of reliability, degree of enthusiasm, and degree of procrastination. Building a predictive model based on homework habits can provide an individualized evaluation of students' sustainability processes and support teachers in adjusting their teaching strategies. This was cross-validated using multiple machine learning algorithms, of which the highest accuracy was 93.34%.
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This paper describes the current state of plagiarism detection and the challenges that arise in modern society and are caused by plagiarism. There are several significant aspects that were highlighted: technological aspects caused by recent developments of modern NLP tools, social aspects caused by the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, development of new content similarity detection methods, etc. All of them add new aspects to plagiarism challenges. © 2022 Copyright for this paper by its authors. Use permitted under Creative Commons License Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0).
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The exceptional circumstances surrounding the COVID-19 closures of campuses and emergency online learning have caused challenging circumstances on preserving academic integrity. Still, little is known about how the interplay between diverse contextual and psychological determinants influences beliefs and inclinations to plagiarism during online learning. The current study aims to understand better multiple factors that predict attitudes and intentions to commit plagiarism during and after the pandemic. To that end, an extended model based on the theory of planned behavior (TPB) that examines the impact of socio-psychological, emotional, motivational, and ethical factors explaining plagiarism intentions was tested. The study applied a survey instrument to a sample of 435 undergraduate students from three universities in Oman. Using the Partial Least Squares-Structural Equation Modeling (PLS-SEM), the results showed that fear of COVID-19 significantly and positively impacted the plagiarism attitude. Academic self-efficacy significantly and negatively influenced attitudes to plagiarism. All TPB variables significantly influenced intention to plagiarize, including subjective norms, attitudes perceived behavioral control and past behavior, except moral obligation. The current study's findings contributed to theory advancement by extending TPB to examining antecedents to subjective norms toward plagiarism and emotional and motivational determinants of attitudes. Finally, the current study recommends practical and research implications for curbing digital plagiarism in higher education post to the pandemic. © 2023 The Author(s). This open access article is distributed under a Creative Commons Attribution (CC-BY) 4.0 license.
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This publication consists of the peer-reviewed papers from the National Conference on Science, Engineering and Technology (NCSET 2020), which was organized by the School of Electrical Engineering at Vellore Institute of Technology, Chennai during the period from May 11-12, 2020. However, due to the COVID 19 pandemic the conference was held Online. The main objective of NCSET 2020 is to provide an opportunity for our research scholars to exchange their research outputs and innovative ideas in different domains of Science, Engineering and Technology, ably guided by our faculty members. This proceeding will include presentations on the niche research areas in the above disciplines.The inaugural session of the conference had the felicitation address by Dr.V.S.Kanchana Bhaaskaran, Pro-Vice Chancellor, VIT Chennai. The conference was inaugurated virtually through the zoom platform on May 11, 2020 by the Chief Guest of the event Mr.Balaji Selvaraju, Founder and Managing director Prominds Global Solutions Pvt. Ltd. Hyderabad. The chief guest elaborated in detail on the long term skills to be acquired by post graduate engineers and research scholars especially under the prevailing Covid 19 pandemic situations. The conference had two keynote Speakers. The first keynote address was delivered by Mr.Karnam Sathiskumar, Managing Director, Engineering Par Formulations, Chennai. He shared about his experiences at VIT Vellore as an undergraduate student of Mechanical Engineering. The second keynote speech was by Mr.V.K.Arunshankar, who is a Trainee Engineer at Danfoss Electric Drives Division, Orgadam Chennai.This year NCSET 2020, had more than 175 participants from VIT Chennai. A total of 171 research articles were submitted and based on the double-blind peer review process 75 full length papers were accepted to be published with Journal of Physics IOP Conference Series. The evaluation of all the papers was performed based on the reports from anonymous reviewers.We would like to take this opportunity to deeply express our heartfelt appreciation to Dr. G. Viswanathan, Founder and Chancellor, Vellore Institute of Technology;Dr. Sekar Viswanathan, Vice President, Vellore Institute of Technology Chennai Campus;Dr. Sandhya Pentareddy, Executive Director, Vellore Institute of Technology Chennai Campus;Dr. Anand A. Samuel, Vice Chancellor, Vellore Institute of Technology;Dr. V. S. Kanchana Bhaaskaran, Pro-Vice Chancellor, Vellore Institute of Technology Chennai Campus;Dr.A.Peer Fathima, Professor and Dean, School of Electrical Engineering;Our special thanks to all our Keynote Speakers, Session Chairs, all the Committee Members and Reviewers involved in the technical evaluation of conference papers.VIRTUAL DISCLAIMER FOR NCSET 2020:• As it was uncertain about when COVID-19 pandemic and travel restrictions across the globe would end, the conference was conducted in virtual mode considering the safety of the participants.• The conference was not postponed to a later period because the scientific community cannot share their research findings and there would have been a delay in publishing their research work.• The virtual conference was organized by Vellore Institute of Technology, Chennai during May 11& 12, 2020 using video conferencing platforms like Microsoft Teams and Zoom.• The conference had 2 keynote speakers;each delivered their talk related to the theme of the conference.• The School of Computer Science and Engineering had a total of 22 Tracks, School of Mechanical and Civil Engineering - 6 Tracks, School of Electronics Engineering - 8 Tracks, Business and Management - 4 Tracks.• At the end of the keynote session, audiences were provided time to clarify their doubts with the speaker and a member from the organizing committee summarized and thanked the speaker.• With regard to the paper presentation, the panel members (session chairs) and audience were given the opportunity to ask questions to the authors regarding their research findings for a duration of 5 minutes.• NCSET2020 had 175 participants from VIT Ch nnai Campus and Eminent Keynotespeakers from India.• All the submitted papers were initially screened for plagiarism using TURNITIN software and only those papers which had less than 10% plagiarism were selected for presentation in the conference. Moreover, all the presented papers were double blind peer reviewed by two reviewers and the authors were instructed to submit the revised manuscript based on the reviewers comments.• NCSET2020 has been conducted successfully during May 11 & 12, 2020. The next edition of the NCSET2020 is planned on November 2020.Best Regards,Editors,Dr.A.Peer FathimaDr.L.PremalathaDr.N.Senthil Kumar
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With online examinations prevailing, academic integrity has become a concern. This study is to explore perceptions of online tests among students. An anonymous online survey was conducted among 156 students enrolled in the health professional courses from the CUHK Faculty of Medicine in the academic year 2019-2020. The majority preferred traditional onsite examination (75%) over online format type (25%) because of a less technical requirement (86%), immediate support from invigilators for unanticipated situations (74%), and easiness of focusing (64%);however, some prefer online examinations due to convenience (66%). The pressure and anxiety towards the study do not have significant differences. The reasons for cheating include the desire to pass (42%), peer influence (42%), outstanding grades (38%), and ease of browsing other websites (31%). The application of the blackboard system, Respondus LockDown Browser, with Zoom invigilation minimises the chance of cheating.
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Ethics in research and how it is translated into practice is fundamental to rule out any potential misconduct either with the scientific method or the way results are presented to the world, thus impacting patients outcomes. The last two years of the Covid-19 pandemic were prolific in exposing the scientific community and healthcare professionals to the many flaws regarding the different studies either with promising simple treatments or sophisticated medications. Supposedly high-profile papers with the antimalarial medication hydroxychloroquine either favoring its use or indicating the risk of death were retracted from very prestigious journals such as the Lancet and the New England Journal of Medicine. Ethics in research became fundamental in reaction to abuses practiced against people as the Nazi studies on concentration camp prisoners or the syphilis study with American prisoners or the US governments radiation experiment. Copyright © 2023 The Author(s)
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The article reports that the appointment of Abdolhossein Khosropanah, as secretary of the Supreme Council of the Cultural Revolution in Iran has caused concern among scientists in the country, after he promoted unproven Islamic medicine as a cure for COVID-19, and has been accused of plagiarism.
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BackgroundDuring the COVID‐19 period, academics and higher education institutions have shown deep concern about academic integrity related to measurement and evaluation issues that have arisen in online education.ObjectivesTo address this concern, this paper examined the prevalence of cheating behaviour among university students before and during the pandemic by comparing self‐reported cheating behaviours of students and academics' perceived levels of cheating behaviours of their students.MethodsA correlational design was employed aligned with study objectives.Results and ConclusionsThe results indicate that although both groups reported a significant increase in cheating incidents in online education, instructors' perceived frequency of student cheating is remarkably greater than students' self‐report cheating incidents. Contrary to the perceptions of instructors and stakeholders in education, students did not report a very drastic cheating increase in online education during the pandemic. The strongest predictive power for online cheating behaviours was the cheating behaviours in face‐to‐face education. Whereas the sensitivity of institutions and course instructors toward cheating behaviour was negatively associated with cheating behaviours in face‐to‐face education, this situational factor did not show a significant effect in distance education. Regarding individual factors, we found a significant relationship between cheating behaviours and gender, discipline, whereas no significant relationship was found in terms of student GPA. Consequently, in order to minimize the threats to the validity of scores associated with cheating, faculty should be supported through faculty development programs and resources so that they can develop authentic assessment strategies for measuring higher‐order thinking skills.Alternate :Lay DescriptionWhat is already known about this topicThe COVID‐19 period created an abrupt shift in learning conditions and measurement processes.Educational administrators and teachers have also shown deep concern about academic integrity related to measurement and evaluation issues that have arisen in distance education during the pandemic period.Previous studies investigating the factors affecting students' academic dishonesty in traditional cheating behaviours have primarily focused on individual and situational factors.What this paper addsThe online education process caused an increase in cheating behaviour scores.There is a substantial range between students and instructors' responses about online cheating during the pandemic.Cheating behaviour in face‐to‐face education significantly explains cheating behaviour in online education. Cheaters in face‐to‐face education are also cheaters in online education.The sensitivity shown by university and course instructors toward cheating yielded a mixed result in online and face‐to‐face education.In online and face‐to‐face education settings, cheating behaviour scores of female students are lower than male students.Students with lower GPA scores generally have higher cheating behaviours.Implications for practice and/or policyIndividual and contextual factors are major determinants of cheating behaviours.In order to minimize the threats on validity of scores associated with cheating, faculty should be supported through faculty development programs and resources so that they can develop authentic assessment strategies for measuring higher‐order thinking skills.This study fills an important gap in the available literature on cheating before and during COVID‐19.The study has a potential to guide higher education institutions for planning and initiating strategies to address cheating in short and long term.
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The use of digital sources is becoming more frequent in any activity of daily life, also in education. This study aims to verify what type of information source university students use when carrying out their academic work during the confinement derived from COVID-19 and to analyze whether, depending on the type of source used (digital, paper, digital and paper), they are produced differences in the plagiarism behaviors, in the causes and in the perception of the actions carried out by teachers to prevent students from committing plagiarism. A quantitative, descriptive methodology was used. We worked with a sample of 2,020 undergraduate and master's students from the three public universities of Galicia. The information collection technique was a questionnaire, applied online. The results show that the students mostly used digital information sources to carry out their academic work during confinement, and that the plagiarism actions carried out are not determined by the type of information source used. In conclusion, the findings of the study can help to understand how and why university students resort to plagiarism when doing their academic work, and to develop interventions that reduce this dishonest academic practice. © 2022 AUFOP. All rights reserved.
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Ethics in research and how it is translated into practice is fundamental to rule out any potential misconduct either with the scientific method or the way results are presented to the world, thus impacting patients outcomes. The last two years of the Covid-19 pandemic were prolific in exposing the scientific community and healthcare professionals to the many flaws regarding the different studies either with promising simple treatments or sophisticated medications. Supposedly high-profile papers with the antimalarial medication hydroxychloroquine either favoring its use or indicating the risk of death were retracted from very prestigious journals such as the Lancet and the New England Journal of Medicine. Ethics in research became fundamental in reaction to abuses practiced against people as the Nazi studies on concentration camp prisoners or the syphilis study with American prisoners or the US governments radiation experiment. Copyright © 2023 The Author(s)
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This chapter examines the responses of Higher Education Institutions (HEIs) to assessment-related challenges introduced by the COVID-19 pandemic. The sudden move to online teaching and assessments required institutions to re-think their approaches to current practices and provide alternative solutions almost overnight. Our survey aimed to gather the perceptions of language teaching practitioners on how the languages sector dealt with the move to digital assessments, with particular emphasis on the delivery of online assessments, the impact on different language skills, as well as academic integrity. Results show that, whilst different institutions adopted varying practices, they seem to share similar concerns in addressing the fast-changing environment and ensure that academic integrity remains at the forefront in the move to the digital world. [For the complete volume, "Innovative Language Teaching and Learning at University: Facilitating Transition from and to Higher Education," see ED619814.]
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Plagiarism is prevalent all over the world, especially in higher education. This quantitative-descriptive study investigated the reasons and gender differences for plagiarism among undergraduate students at Wenzhou-Kean University (WKU). To collect quantitative data, the random sample of 102 undergraduates at WKU answered questions about plagiarism in the online questionnaire. The results revealed that the development of technology and the Internet is the main reason for plagiarism. Surprisingly, the study found that students are confident with their citation skills. The participants reported that using additional materials to help with their online testing is easy during the COVID-19 pandemic. The COVID-19 pandemic has become another significant reason for plagiarism. In terms of gender differences, the results showed no significant difference in attitudes and behaviors toward plagiarism among WKU undergraduate students by gender. The study advises educational institutions like WKU should use both traditional solutions (e.g., failing the plagiarized assignment, giving suspension to student) and new solutions (e.g., using plagiarism tracking system) to deal with plagiarism.
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Faculty members are crucial partners in promoting academic integrity at Canadian universities, but their needs related to academic integrity are neither well documented nor understood. To address this gap, we developed a mixed methods survey to gather faculty perceptions of facilitators and barriers to using the existing academic integrity procedures, policies, resources, and supports required to promote academic integrity. In this article, we report the data collected from 330 participants at four Canadian universities. Responses pointed to the importance of individual factors, such as duty to promote academic integrity, as well as contextual factors, such as teaching load, class size, class format, availability of teaching assistant support, and consistency of policies and procedures, in supporting or hindering academic integrity. We also situated these results within a micro (individual), meso (departmental), macro (institutional), and mega (community) framework. Results from this study contribute to the growing body of empirical evidence about faculty perspectives on academic integrity in Canadian higher education and can inform the continued development of existing academic integrity supports at universities.
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Discipline of students in the teaching and learning process is very important to support the suSDN 01 Iwul, SDN 02 Iwul, SDN 03 Iwuless of the teaching and learning process in the classroom during the COVID-19 pandemic. However, many students lack discipline when participating in the teaching and learning process during the COVID-19 pandemic, such as being late for a Zoom class, turning off the camera unilaterally for various reasons, and turning off the sound when asked to participate for technical reasons. This study aims to find out a clear picture of the teacher's strategy in disciplining student learning online during the Covid-19 pandemic at SDN 01 Iwul, SDN 02 Iwul, and SDN 03 Iwul. The approach in this study is a qualitative approach, the method used is a descriptive method. Sources of data used in this study is primary data. Primary data were obtained from the answers to interviews conducted with key informants who were designated as research samples. The result of this study is that student discipline in the implementation of online learning during the Covid-19 pandemic at SDN 01 Iwul, SDN 02 Iwul, and SDN 03 Iwul is quite good. Teachers teach based on lesson plans and syllabus and teach with mixed methods (blended learning) using whats up group applications, google class rooms, and google meet in learning. The teacher's strategy in disciplining student learning online is by making learning contracts, providing understanding material about discipline with the narrative method. And being an example by always being on time, besides that, the teacher always gives assignments to get students to be disciplined in learning. The obstacles that oSDN 01 Iwul, SDN 02 Iwul, SDN 03 Iwulur after the student discipline strategy is implemented are that there are still students who do not do assignments on time, student participation in conveying arguments or opinions is still low so that learning runs monotonously. In addition, students often commit plagiarism in completing their assignments. The efforts made are by always advising and providing an understanding of the importance of discipline and providing good examples and examples to students. Create groups, so that students are more active in learning because they have to present and discuss. The next step, if three times the student is reprimanded, the student is not also present in the online class and does not collect assignments, then the teacher asks the homeroom teacher and BK teacher for help to reprimand the student. Copyright © 2022 Wolters Kluwer Medknow Publications. All rights reserved.
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The Covid-19 pandemic led to increased use of home exams, with a perceived increase of cheating. Assessment integrity is a key challenge for higher education. Apart from remote proctoring, what other mitigations may be possible against cheating in home exams, and specifically for programming courses with huge classes? The paper presents our approaches to mitigate cheating, for CS1 based on questions with subtly different variants, for CS2 based on plagiarism detection and timestamps - in sufficient detail that others could use a similar approach. These two approaches can be partially effective against collaboration, but less so against contract cheating where help is acquired from an outside third party. Hence, towards the end of the paper we also outline possible approaches to mitigate such cheating, without or in addition to remote proctoring. © 2022 IEEE.