Student perceptions of the acceptability of various code-writing practices

Abstract

This paper reports on research that used focus groups and a national online survey of computing students at Australian universities to investigate perceptions of acceptable academic practices in writing program code for assessment. The results indicate that computing students lack a comprehensive understanding of what constitutes acceptable academic practice with regard to writing program code. They are not clear on the need to reference code taken from other sources, or on how to do so. Where code from other sources is used, or inappropriate collaboration takes place between students, there appears to be a feeling that any academic misconduct is diminished or even nullified if the students subsequently work with the code to make it their own. These findings suggest a need for the development of standards that elucidate acceptable practices for computing, combined with ongoing education of computing students.

Attribution and plagiarism in the creative arts

“…The major works addressing specifically attribution and plagiarism of non-text works acknowledge the lack of literature on the topic, while also arguing that it has not been addressed adequately within universities via formal academic honesty or academic integrity policies (Blythman et al, 2007;Garrett & Robinson, 2012;Simon, 2016;Simon et al, 2014). In research published in 2014, Simon et al conducted a survey of Australian academics and students who use non-text based assessments, and found 'a widespread perception … that current academic integrity policies in relation to non-text-based assessments, and associated efforts to educate students about these policies, are inadequate' (2014, p.13).…”

Academic Integrity in Non-Text Based Disciplines

“…In a subsequent survey of computing students and academics, they found substantial differences between the attitudes to certain practices with text and computing assessments and between perceptions of plagiarism/collusion and perceptions of acceptability (Simon et al 2014a). They also found that computing students have a poor understanding of acceptable academic practice when writing computer code, that they are not aware of the need to reference code taken from other sources, and that they do not know how to do so (Simon et al 2014b).…”

Academic Integrity and Professional Integrity in Computing Education

“…One clear finding from the literature is that many students and academics see no problem with students reusing code that they have written for another project [6,10,16], although outside computing education this is called self-plagiarism and is considered academically inappropriate [3].…”

“…There is also a widely held view that there is nothing wrong with students working together on individual assignments, or copying much of another student's assignment, so long as the student submitting the assignment does a reasonable amount of the work [6,10,16]. Again, in the broader world of academic integrity these practices are considered inappropriate, and are generally called collusion [3].…”

“…In a broad survey of computing students and academics [16], we presented a number of scenarios and asked respondents both whether they constituted plagiarism or collusion and whether they were academically acceptable practices. In other parts of the survey we asked respondents to rank some possible sources from which students might copy code, then posed a number of scenarios and asked respondents whether they considered them acceptable, first in the context of academic study and then in the context of professional practice.…”