Assessing student programming - not agency RentACoding

Thomas LancasterUCE Birmingham

Disciplinary Commons June 9 2006

Material sourced from:

‘Eliminating the successor to plagiarism? Identifying the usage of contract cheating sites’

Robert Clarke & Thomas Lancaster

JISC 2nd International Plagiarism Conference, Newcastle, June 19 – 21 2006

A portfolio

http://commons.thomaslancaster.co.uk

Contract cheating processstudent creates bid request

sellers bid to complete work…for a competitive price

student selects a seller -funds placed in escrow

bidder creates original work

student submits original work

Why bother?

• Because students are using RentACoder.

• 12.3% of bid requests on RentACoder represent contract cheating.– (3 week exhaustive check of RentACoder

submissions i.e. 99 out of 803 bid requests).

Extent of use

• 236 contract cheaters identified over a 2 month period.

– 19 (8.1%) made only a single bid request.– 122 (51.7%) made between 2 and 7 bid

requests.

– 6 (2.5%) made 51 or more bid requests.

Redesigning assessment

• Assess students when they can be monitored:– in lab assessments

• Ensure that students understand what they have produced.– vivas– in lab assessment

• Produce unique watermarked assignment specifications for every student.

Only 1 identified this year

http://www.rentacoder.com

Any questions?

Any answers?