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Teaching and Educational note
An approach to detecting plagiarism in spreadsheet assignments: A digital answer to digital cheating
Anil Singh a,⇑, George Mangalaraj b, Aakash Taneja c a b c School of Business, University of Texas at Brownsville, 80 Fort Brown, Brownsville, TX 78520, United States
College of Business and Technology, Western Illinois University, 1 University Circle, Macomb, IL 61455, United States
School of Business, The Richard Stockton College of New Jersey, 101 Vera King Farris Drive, Galloway, NJ 08205, United States
a r t i c l e
i n f o
Article history:
Available online 10 March 2012
Keywords:
Spreadsheet assignments
Pedagogical issues
Plagiarism detection
Digital plagiarism
a b s t r a c t
Accounting instructors often experience frustration when confronted by plagiarism in student assignments. Also, they face difficulty verifying and proving cases of plagiarism. Students have increasingly found it easier to plagiarize assignments because of digitization in education. Instructors face an important pedagogical challenge due to digitization based plagiarism. Digitization, however, provides instructors with tools to address this issue. This paper showcases three tried and tested methods built into spreadsheet software to identify and detect plagiarism in spreadsheet based assignments. The first method is a manual method of hiding unique markers in files sent to students. The second method involves hiding a formula that can track plagiarism in more detail.
The third method uses a program code to track issues related to authorship of assignments. These methods along with a compiled list of strategies discussed in this paper can help reduce plagiarism.
Published by Elsevier Ltd.
1. Introduction
The purpose of a university is to impart knowledge and
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