What is AssignmentWatch
AssignmentWatch aims to empower academics. Rather than detecting misconduct after it has occurred (as is common with text-matching tools), AssignmentWatch aims to detect and prevent misconduct before it occurs. The focus of AssignmentWatch is on plagiarism stemming from file-sharing and homework-helper websites, a major source of academic misconduct.
File-sharing and contract cheating websites are a growing source of academic misconduct. Students can upload assignment tasks & questions to these websites and rapidly receive an answer. Misconduct through this method cannot be detect via text-matching tools, and generally unless you are actively monitoring, this type of misconduct is hard to detect.
Homework-helper and contract-cheating webistes can be an effective means for students to cheat. The figure below shows an example of an online exam questions being uploaded to multiple home-work helper sites.
AssignmentWatch works by monitoring the internet content which uniquely matches your assignment. When a match is found, the relevant academic is notified via email. This removes the burden of manual monitoring, empowering you to take action to ensure the integrity of their unit.
AssignmentWatch works best with assignment tasks which commonly appear on homework helper sites. These are generally short and medium response questions like those found on quizzes, problem solving tasks, and take-home exams. These questions are discrete and can be solved in a relatively short period of time. These can be from multiple disciples, including STEM, ICT and business subjects.
How to use AssignmentWatch
Assignment watch is simple and easy to use. A monitoring campaign involves the following steps.
- Starting a campaign: As AssignmentWatch campaign is initiated by completing the monitoring form. This will require your assignment and contact details.
- Selecting monitoring terms: AssigmentWatch works by monitoring the internet for specific terms. Guidance on monitoring term selection is given below and in the usage video.
- Select type of website to monitor: Two options are provided here, either to only monitor domains known for academic misconduct, or monitor all domains. By monitoring all domains, AssignmentWatch is more sensitive, and is more likely to detect content uploaded content, but also increases the likelihood of false positives.
- Submit: Submit the monitoring form. You will receive an email notification to confirm submission.
- Initial search: Within 10 minutes of your submission, AssignmentWatch will conduct an initial broad search to detect matching content. The purpose of this is to detect matching content which might already be online. This generally applies when you have used a similar assignment in previous years. This initial search has increased sensitivity and thus may present more false-positives. You should receive an email notification once the intial search has completed.
- Ongoing monitoring: AssignmentWatch will continually monitor your assignment. You will receive an email if matching content is identified. This email also has the opportunity to identify content as true- or false-positives.
- Campaign conclusion: AssignmentWatch will continue monitoroing until your provided due date. At the end of the monitoring campaign, you will receive an email summary.
Monitoring Term Selection
Successful monitoring is predicated upon the quality of monitoring terms. The more unique, the better the monitoring. Generally, a single monitoring term per question (or section of an assignment) is appropriate.
Good monitoring terms include:
- Unique names (e.g. assignment title, fictional character/place names (see Feirdzam the Engineer below)).
- Unique clauses or sentences.
- Multiple sentences.
Note, each monitoring term is treated individually. Multiple non-unique terms will not improve monitoring.
Additional advice on monitoring term selection can be found in the usage guide video.
