As a student at the Australian Performing Arts Conservatory, it is your responsibility to be aware of the rules that surround submitting your assignments including plagiarism and cheating. But have you heard the term Contract Cheating before? Over your time at APAC you may have heard some fellow students or lecturers using the term Contract Cheating, however you may not know exactly what it means and how it could impact you.
Contract Cheating is defined as work produced by an external agent or third party and submitted under the pretences of being a student’s original piece of work. In simpler terms, a student is not allowed to submit any work that was not been created by themselves.
As you know when you upload your essay assessments in Moodle, you will be asked to complete the checkbox to acknowledge that it is your own work before you upload the document. The Unicheck Plagiarism software that we use also allows you to check your essay before you submit it. It offers the following feedback so you can make changes to your document in case of unintentional plagiarism.
Easy-to-interpret scan results Each unoriginal passage or sentence is highlighted. Thus, you will quickly find those text parts which need to be worked over and which need proper referencing.
Similarity sources with spotted duplication Once a similarity check is performed, you can view a full list of links to the sources where duplications were detected. Similarities are spotted on each original source. This way you will be able to notice even the smallest text fonts fast no matter how many pages the source has.
Similarity reports can be downloaded You can view similarity check results both online and offline. For the latter, you will just need to click the “Download Report” icon. As a result, you will get a .pdf report with links to the sources with spotted text matches. Based on the report, you can easily provide feedback to your students saying what exactly should be corrected.
If you require any further assistance, please contact Julia Lewis on 3229 6929 or julia.lewis@apac.edu.au