Plagiarism prevention is discipline specific : a view from computer science.

Many of the good-practice guidelines on tackling plagiarism and collusion are primarily relevant to essays and research projects. In Computer Science, and particularly in undergraduate first-year modules, there is an emphasis on understanding basic principles and standard techniques: students are often assessed by being required to apply these techniques to an example system. Constructing suitable examples is time-consuming, and the range of possible solutions is small, so we find that collusion is as much a problem as plagiarism. This is also true of Engineering and Mathematical disciplines where there is a foundation of laws and theories that must be mastered and sometimes only one right answer to a problem. We suggest guidelines for the design of in-course assessments and the procedures that accompany them that can help to reduce the opportunities for plagiarism while recognising the constraints imposed by limited staff time and large student numbers.Peer reviewe