I will be honest (full disclosure: I work in an academic institution). This obsessions with plaigarism is utter crap.<p>I know this is an opinion, but I have built a philosophy through years of failing at tasks. If you do not do your work, who cares? Time and time again, I see kids that cheat and they never tread water. Even if they graduate, they have problems. Because the final product is irrelevant in the education process, it is the developmental process you are paying for. The real world is dissimilar of course, but without skills and reasoning skills it is harder and harder beat competitors when making a superior product, whatever it is. Therein lies the rub.<p>I was a language major, intentionally or not, because I wanted to study in speciliazations where there is a binary choice: you know or you do not, you are fluent or you are not. Now there are tests that "prove" that, but only by application and communicating in a native way you can advance and miscommunication with a native speaker reminds you which side of the spectrum you are on. It took me longer to appreciate it, but computer science, as an extension of the language of mathematics, is something you apply and grasp, or you do not. You cannot fool a computer into a sorting algorithm without grasping and explaining the requisite steps (unless you end in system administration and the continued absence of 4th generation languages, haha).<p>No academic institution will espouse this view, as credentials cost money, and cheating devalues the brand when moronic indivdiuals with said credentials showed they have no skills in applying skills or analyzing info.<p>Just my thoughts. Seen it so many times as a student and an employee, I lost count.
You could also not count homework towards the GPA.<p>I studied in France where the system is a bit different. We had homework, and they were graded so we could get feedback, but the idea that a homework grade would count towards your GPA would have seemed utterly absurd. Homework was meant to help you master the material and figure out if you understood it, not evaluate you!<p>Exams were taken in a large hall, with many supervisors. We also had graded projects to complete during the semesters, but no two students (or group of students for group projects) were assigned the same project.<p>Doing my graduate studies in the US came as a shock. There was a ton of homework, and the grade mattered! This meant that if you already knew or understood the material, you couldn't just skip the homework: you had to do the whole stupid thing.
There are few original thoughts ever. Plagiarism and the ownership of thoughts are so misplaced, particularly in modern society. Think of your writings as your gift to society for its betterment and not something you've done for the advancement of your personal brand and the idea of owning a thought seems silly.<p>Having to rephrase something because someone already said it that way is an insane waste of time from a bygone era. Open source thought already.
We could start by ceasing to teach students to technically avoid "plagiarism!" accusations with the simple-minded application of a thesaurus. "Write it in your own words." Which often becomes s/word/similar word/. This was never a good idea. There may have been some tiny amount of value in this approach[1] when it was required to actually find a thesaurus and a dictionary and learn new words, but that is certainly lost today when there are myriad tools which will automatically do this for you. I'd still argue that it does more harm than good since it teaches students how to use others' ideas without attribution.<p>[1] Not as an exercise to instil honesty or principle, but as a simple vocabulary and grammar teaching activity.
It strikes me that perhaps the simplest way to kill plagiarism is to simply require a handwritten rough draft. Take the copy/paste convenience out of cheating, and far fewer students will cheat: writing your own thoughts is a lot less tedious than hand-copying someone else's. It also has the bonus of ensuring that at least some minimal editing has taken place, over the course of writing the paper a second time.<p>Students with disabilities that prevent writing a draft by hand -actually missing the dominant hand or not having use of it, or arthritis in the wrists, or carpal tunnel syndrome, or whatever- will need accommodations, of course. No solution will catch everyone. But it should still radically shrink the pool of copied (and copyable) papers.
Perhaps a good approach would be to assume a format is compromised as it is, but still focus on doing the best possible job of testing students. It should be possible to gear things such that plagiarism does not really do enough to be worth it (e.g. you would still do poorly on oral presentations / interviews, exam essay questions, etc.).