Impact of Customized Exercises on Homework Copying Among Undergraduate Engineering Students.

The quality of teaching can be reflected in the quality of homework that students produce. However. if students copy homework, teachers will be unable to evaluate their work accurately. At present, there are no effective means to objectively verify that homework copying has occurred, or to quantify its scale. In this paper, homework copying is studied through experiments and statistical analysis. An experimental group and a control group which are consistent in all possible influencing factors are selected. A customized exercise generation system (CES) is designed and applied to prevent homework copying in the experimental group. In contrast, the control group has no restrictions on copying homework. The answer sheets handed in by the two groups are graded according to a standardized process, and the correct rate for each question of the two groups is calculated. Subsequently, we studied the relationship between "the difference of the correct rate between the two groups" and "homework copying". Results indicate that there is a significant difference in the overall mean of the correct rate between the experimental group and the control group, and the existence of homework copying is highly plausible. To quantify the homework copying scale, we propose a method to calculate the homework copying scale of each question in the experiments. Then. the factors that influence homework copying, particularly the question difficulty, are studied and a relationship between the difficulty of a question and its scale of homework copying is obtained. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]