Developing students' understanding in
academic honesty to improve learning

McCabe (2003) maintains cheating has been prevalent for years with contributing factors ranging from laziness to ignorance - and not just on the part of students. However, there is an emerging trend that it is worsening particularly with business students and in later years of study. The Internet and the increasing diversity of educational and cultural backgrounds of students have been singled out as possible reasons. Software is a possible solution for making plagiarism detection simpler and commercial providers, including Turnitin.com, have become major university stakeholders. However, building blocks for standard learning management systems (e.g. Blackboard) have more recently become available (eg. SafeAssignment.com).

Rather than detection after the event, we propose a strategy that uses it primarily as an educational tool. We posit that this approach will develop students' understanding of academic honesty, promote honest academic practices, support the development of students as ethical professionals (a common generic graduate attribute) and promote the pursuit of life long learning.

A pilot project over Summer School 2005 provided students the opportunity to submit draft written assessments for evaluation by SafeAssignments. Students then had the opportunity to detect incidences of plagiarism provided by the matching score of their work against both peers and existing published documents, and amend their assessments before final submission. In this paper we present the results on students' attitudes to this process and their feedback on the educational benefits of using the detection software in this way.