Reducir el plagio en ensayos con el auto-aprendizaje

Abstract

Reducir el plagio en ensayos es un proceso importantísimo pero costoso en recursos, con un impacto reducido sobre el comportamiento del estudiante. Una combinación de un test de auto-aprendizaje sobre plagio, junto a la repetición del ensayo, logra reducir la infracción del plagio a mínimos, y fomenta el aprendizaje del uso de fuentes científicas, incluso a largo plazo.

Most students are not familiar with the scientific rules governing plagiarism, and fail to internalise rules explained prior, and a lecturer’s feedback after, the writing of an essay, even if this involves penalties on grades or an escalation of sanctions. In this experiment, we debate plagiarism after writing an essay, but give no grades, letting all students instead assess the degree of plagiarism in several real cases with an online tool.Students who committed plagiarism on the essay must take and pass a multiple choice test with similar real cases, and are then invited to repeat the essay. We find plagiarism rates drop in later essays from 30% to 0%, while in previous years, and/or other groups not taking the experiment, rates drop only to 20%.