Legality, quality assurance and learning: competing discourses of plagiarism management in higher education

Abstract

In universities around the world, plagiarism management is an ongoing issue of quality assurance and risk management. Plagiarism management discourses are often framed by legal concepts of authorial rights, and plagiarism policies outline penalties for infringement. Learning and teaching discourses argue that plagiarism management is, and should remain, a learning and teaching issue and press for more student-centred approaches to plagiarism management. Institutions must navigate these competing discourses in their attempts to design workable plagiarism management policies. After outlining plagiarism management contexts from the United Kingdom, Australia and Sweden to provide a sense of international work in the area, this article proposes a learner-centred quality assurance model (adapted from the work of Harvey and Newton (2004)) for plagiarism management. The proposed model refocuses on the learner and classroom practices in quality assurance processes. It offers a framework utilising learning, teaching and internal institutional research on plagiarism management to inform overall university policy.

Keywords:

• Australia
• higher education
• learning and teaching
• plagiarism model
• policy
• quality assurance
• Sweden
• United Kingdom

Acknowledgements

The author thanks Jude Carroll, ASKe Business School, Oxford, UK, for her input on an early draft of this article and Brian Martin, University of Wollongong, Australia, for his helpful comments.