We have just noticed the word “Plagi” trending in student submissions for final assignment. These assignments may be technical reports or computer code solutions, often contained with ZIP files. We see the word in the name of folders or documents within the submission or sometimes in the commentary.
Despite seeing the word we already have suspicions that the work was not entirely by the student’s own hand and was achieved by contract cheating. It did not have the look and feel of an AI-created document (the subject may actually be AI itself and the graders are fully experienced in that area)!
Naïvely the team first thought “Plagi” was the name of the author and we searched places like Freelancer for operatives that use that as their handle. We noticed many profiles of providers that say ”We provide Plagi”, which indicated it was a form of slang relating to protection from plagiarism detection. We saw it often when the student provided a document that we had not asked for and was outside the specification – an unnecessary justification related to the assignment, which was one of the alarm-bell triggers.
I know there are others (herein) whose research areas relate to contract cheating, so am asking here for clarification on the word from academics generally. At the moment we cannot use the simple existence of the word as prima-facie evidence that academic misconduct took place.
Postscript
Our prosecution case was deemed to have insufficient evidence of misconduct as we could not prove the origin of the material use by the student. Further information from other institution cases might have swayed the panel, hence this question. Only those cases where the student admitted paying for the work were successful.
