This is a report by of Dr Joel Talcott of Aston University, who uses CopyCatch and CopyChecker together after running a pilot project in 2002/2003. This project concluded, as you can read below, that the combined approach helped improve the students' research and writing skills.
The Psychology degree offered by the Psychology Institute at Aston University is a writing intensive 3 year (or 3 years plus a sandwich placement year) programme that is accredited by the British Psychological Society. In each year of the programme we have approximately 200 students, including those who come to education through both traditional and non-traditional (e.g. mature students) routes. The writing skills of the students are extremely variable and many find it difficult to produce written work of the quality and quantity we expect and most are overly reliant upon secondary source material (e.g., textbooks) when preparing their essays. We therefore require all first year students to complete a series of "study skills" sessions in which they learn the craft of scientific writing, including ethical issues pertaining to plagiarism/collusion. Plagiarism/collusion is a major issue in contemporary academia, and we acknowledge that we have a problem with some students in our programme. Our aim is to teach students how to avoid accidental plagiarism, while also rooting out those who plagiarise or collude willfully.
CopyCatch identifies essays that are similar in wording to one another. It therefore saves us, the course instructors, a great deal of time, by highlighting essays that we should examine more closely for plagiarism/collusion. When an essay is suspected of not being original work by the student, the descriptive data provided by CopyCatch has proved definitive when disciplinary procedures have been necessary.
Because we now worry less about the integrity of students' work, CopyCatch enables our faculty to spend more time on the important aspects of education, namely teaching. It is in this respect that we are excited about the developments of CopyChecker. Of course, most of our students are honest, yet a proportion of them have, for various reasons, adopted the habit of working side-by-side with a text when writing their essays.
In these cases we are especially aware that a student may plagiarise accidentally. It is therefore important to teach students how to improve their research and writing skills to avoid such unwillfull plagiarism. CopyChecker provides us with a tool for doing this. Students learn by working with this software that it is difficult not to plagiarise material when working side-by-side with it, and, using the software, we teach them alternative strategies for learning to avoid this pitfall. This also improves their study and writing skills more generally. Last year we piloted this method on students who submitted non-original work, which we detected with CopyCatch. This year we will pilot the use of CopyChecker as part of our study skills sessions, which all the students complete as a mandatory component of their first-year coursework.