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Lacking originality is magnified in digital drawings submitted to school
I teach design courses for architecture students, and I noticed many students grab ready projects from the internet and submit them with little or no modifications. I was able to prove some of the incidents and took actions against them, however, many cases I still suspect without evidence.
In my perspective, it is damaging to the fairness of the teacher's evaluation when the cheating students score as the hard-working students. What is more important is that cheating students don't really engage in the design process and never work their thinking and research skill. In senior years, we get students who are empty of information and incompetent.
I have tried different solutions, like checking the submitted file information, but cheating students undermined this technique by replacing their file and exploding its components and blocks, leaving no trace of the original file. I also enforced a mid-work submission for the projects, and students have gotten through that too, by removing some of the drawings and s.
So, I am wondering if there are techniques or ideas to overcome this issue. Thanks to you all.
Are you involved enough in the process to have a good feeling as to whether the work is original and what its genesis is? Instead of searching for a way to automatically find cheaters I'd suggest the better way would be to get more involved in the process beyond just basic check-ins and periodic milestones.
What Pete says. Since we have no idea what level you teach, it's easy to say "go back to the drawing board (literally)" but if students see stealing as acceptable (and you've made clear that it's not), then you really need to stop and assign tasks where stealing is impossible. Designing furniture, coincidentally, is a great place to start. You can assign everybody in pairs, and have them each design a chair for eachother, for example. This should set the tone for future projects. But something tells me you're not very involved with actual instruction, and the possibly of redoing your assignments has long passed.
Are you by any chance grabbing your design courses from the internet ;-)
Crowdsourcing then counts, right?
Thanks to you all, for your responses. To be clear, this is my second semester as an architectural design instructor for undergrad students, but in somewhat old fashioned school. Design courses are determined by building types, and projects do not vary too much from previous years, something I am still fighting to change. @bowling, thanks for sharing your ideas.
Maybe the students seem to "lack originality" because the school "lacks originality." If whats expected is to repeat the technical aspects of previous years' assignments, then why WOULDN'T they cheat? It doesn't sound like originality is being asked of them in the first place. Good luck.
Good point there. If the project program is so rigid that there isn't much of any kind of room for originality, it becomes a difficult if not nearly impossible task to be original. The first few years, students had it easy but how many ways can you design a box until it is nearly impossible to be unique especially if you demand the same floor plan layout, fenestration sizes and locations. Even further, if you lock down the style. There is a point when stuff just doesn't have diversity to invoke creativity. You have to make room for creatively addressing a project program and provide room to be creative.
Is this a question about plagiarism of design? We can discipline students for plagiarism of words. Why not design? If the design composition is substantively the same even like when a sentence or paragraph is substantively the same with no meaningful change.... why not? Whether we are talking art of words or art of pictorial.... should it at all make any difference.
They also can discipline students for plagiarism of music. So, why not pictorial?
However, I see both sides of the issue. On one hand, you want to get students to be creative. On the other hand, if assignments are so overused and over done and that it is rigid so much so that the end results lack diversity.
Regardless, there will always be lazy students too lazy to be creative.
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