Being a distance education institution, our current infrastructure does not allow group or collaborative work on undergraduate level. Although students are allowed to work together and assist each other, each student is required to submit individual attempts for assignments and/or projects. Assignments that are so similar that we could not accept them as individual attempts are considered cheating. According to the literature, cheating in assignments and projects is a problem in educational institutions at all levels. Students often use ingenious ways to disguise dishonesty. It is not always possible to determine the extent of the problem due to the inability to identify all instances, especially in modules with large student numbers. We investigated this problem in a second-level computing module. The examination results of students suspected of cheating were analysed and compared with the results of the rest of the students (the control group). This was done for 2004 and 2005. In this paper we report on our findings in this regard.

During the past few years science faculties at tertiary education institutions in South Africa have had to face increasing pressure from national as well as provincial government bodies to improve the student throughput rate. Various suggestions have been made to achieve this goal. This paper investigates the viability of two of these suggestions for solving the throughput problem. It is part of a larger reflexive research project investigating various aspects of the teaching and learning of Computing and IS through distance education. Information from the assignment records and the examination marks of students for a specific Computer Science second year module with a practical component was used for this study.

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