Collusion is a type of plagiarism and so represents a form of unacceptable academic practice that should always be avoided.
Collusion refers to working too closely with one or more individuals to help solve and/or answer an assessed task or question, producing a joint answer or solution (intentionally or not) to gain an unfair advantage over other students.
Collusion may involve:
In each of these examples, the final work presented for assessment is no longer that of the individual because it either includes undisclosed contributions from other individuals or has enabled others to enhance their answer in an unfair manner. As such, it now represents the understanding and application of the group and not the individual.
Anyone who takes part in these or similar examples to gain an advantage in marks and in which their work becomes blurred with that of others has colluded. As such, they are at risk of losing marks or being awarded a zero grade for their assignment, because they have submitted plagiarised work as their own.
OpenLearn - Developing good academic practice Except for third party materials and otherwise, this content is made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 Licence, full copyright detail can be found in the acknowledgements section. Please see full copyright statement for details.