Antiplagiarism in educational remote laboratories done right: Technological, educational and psychological implications

Abstract

Remote and virtual labs are becoming increasingly more important in engineering education. With growing number of students it is desirable to automate teacher's work as much as possible. A number of plagiarism checking software tools already exist but they are mostly text-oriented. Laboratory session reports usually contain many graphs and plots. Also, in the case of remote and virtual laboratories a master copy of experimental data produced by students is also at teacher's disposal. This paper addresses the problems connected with the laboratory work reports provided by students. The software solution for mitigating such problems in a pilot remote laboratory is described. Details of technical implementation of such system are discussed. A new format for unique identifiers for experimental data in remote labs is proposed. It is argued that not only such system can potentially prevent students from cheating but it can also prevent them from attempting to cheat.