Letter from the London Internet plagiarism epidemic With the exam and essays season drawing to a close, lecturers, examiners and school teachers in Britain are confronted with the prospect of not only marking huge numbers of answer papers and essays, but also being extra vigilant about the possibility of at least some of their students presenting work that is not entirely their own. In May, a student of English at the University of Kent, was expelled following a routine review of his work which “revealed extensive plagiarism from internet sources”. His downloading hyperactivity was discovered the day before his final exam, and he is now suing the university for negligence, claiming he wasn’t warned that such ‘research’ is against university regulations. Kent University authorities insist they have “robust and well established procedures in place to combat plagiarism and all students are given clear guidance on this issue in the faculty and departments’ handbooks”. A spokesman for the National Union of Students says that while it doesn’t condone plagiarism, there is an urgent need for universities to spell out what is, and what is not acceptable practice regarding utilisation of information available on the worldwide web. Most educationists concede that such discovered cases are the tip of a very large iceberg. Internet research has now become one of the first ports of call for education material at all levels. The Times Educational Supplement recently revealed that thousands of teenagers are signing up on-line to swap essays, and that at least six major websites offer services targeted at British 14-18 year olds. Student Media Services Ltd, for example, runs a website which has 47,000 users and describes itself as the “home of a collaborative project to preserve intellectual and academic information and catalogue it for the benefit of students”. It offers a tailor-made service of essays written by undergraduates. Asking prices are £167.95 (Rs.13,600) for a ten-page A-level essay or £95.95 (Rs.7,770) for an eight-page GCSE essay, written on two days’ notice. Nevertheless the indications are that the majority of students plagiarise out of ignorance, the difficulty being that electronic sources of information are not perceived as intellectual property in the same way as printed material. Within academia the current emphasis is on a coordinated approach to deal with the problem — provision of clear and enforced guidelines on plagiarism, and combining feedback and fear to discourage copying and collusion. Dr. Chris Willmott of Leicester University devised an informal blueprint four years ago to detect academic plagiarism. He says that vigilant teachers can spot the problem from tell-tale signs in their students’ coursework by being aware of their writing styles and recognising promptly when they deviate from normal. If they suspect a work is not the student’s own, they need only to type five or six words from the pupil’s essay on to a web search engine to verify their suspicion. Although achieving high marks for someone else’s coursework can bring little satisfaction, the need to gain at least a 2:1 degree may override common…
