Disable Copy and Paste

Comments

4 comments

  • Liz Pilkington

    great idea

    0
    Comment actions Permalink
  • Matt Smith

    Personal experience opinion - I did some testing on this at a prior ICT-based RTO across six years and we found it had no measurable impact on students taking responses from the learning material.  It is essentially a feature for the sake of it and has been falling out of favour since 2005+.  I am also a developer so have some technical insight into this as well.

    Technologically, there is always a way past and disabling right-click or disabling screenshots does not prevent plagiarism, neither does it protect your IP.  Like anything digital, once you release it you run the risk of it being copied and misused.  Implementing any disabling features just become a point of frustration for students, as it prevents them more easily having references for later in life, diminishing some of the student value from a course.

    Pedagogically, if this was to be implemented, then it shifts the focus of students away from learning and recall and instead on how to construct sentences and paragraphs to get past the checks in the system.  This is not inherently a demonstration of competence in the subject matter, just the ability to reference and paraphrase which, unless they are studying a language course, is perhaps not the intent.  I would argue that learning and demonstration of learning is not inherently tied to things being in their own words.  You also then have the caveat of ChatGPT to reword content and then students are just cheating your system entirely...

    From the above, I'd argue that this should not be implemented as all it does is introduce a barrier to the student experience without benefit and does also not really serve business needs accurately either.

    Happy to discuss.

    2
    Comment actions Permalink
  • Martin Jones

    Thanks for the feedback Matt, with which I tend to agree especially in relation to our courses. I also wouldn't favour implementing this change unless there was an override option (ie to enable) in settings

    1
    Comment actions Permalink
  • Sky Walker

    This is a feature our team have also suggested. While it would not suit a one rule for all assessments, the option to disable for specific questions would be ideal. Such as this example someone posted here:

    https://support.axcelerate.com.au/hc/en-gb/community/posts/5002560730383-Disabling-copy-paste-feature-on-assessment-to-discourage-plagiarism 

    0
    Comment actions Permalink

Please sign in to leave a comment.