There are some in the academic community who feel that the growing use of computers and the internet in schools, colleges and universities is devaluing coursework and turning students into cheats who simply download their essays from the web. But just how widespread is plagiarism in the UK's educational establishments, and what can be done to prevent it?

It's true that the internet makes cheating much simpler for those who are inclined to do it. Old-fashioned plagiarism used to entail hours spent poring through books to find relevant passages for inclusion in coursework. The student then had to copy the text by hand, a form of repetition that according to many teachers represents an important and common form of learning in itself.

But multiple references to even the most obscure fact can now be found in a matter of seconds just by typing the term into a search engine. Once found, the text can be pasted into a word processor document, automatically formatted for presentation and printed out under the new owner's name in just a few minutes.

There are even websites, often called essay banks or pools, that specialise in offering pre-written essays and coursework. The majority are careful to offer disclaimers warning of the perils of breaching their copyright, but if they are used sensibly they can provide useful points of reference for students genuinely interested in producing their own work.

Plagiarism in schools
Dr Martin Stephen, master of St Paul's school in Barnes, south-west London, and chairman of the Independent Schools Council, recently told The Guardian that the coursework element of certain GCSE subjects was rife with cheating, particularly among those with access to the internet.

"It's almost impossible to control or contain plagiarism now," he said. "It is also discriminatory; infinitely easier for young people with home internet access or, for that matter, in a house with books."

David Taylor, vice-principal at a secondary comprehensive in Witchford, Cambridgeshire disagrees and maintains that plagiarism is rarely a problem. He believes that teachers know instinctively when a pupil's work is not their own.

Nor does he believe that the value of coursework and homework has been devalued by increased internet use. "Plagiarism is not a major problem. A bigger one is friends copying each others' work," he said.

Adrian Mee, a teacher for 15 years and now a lecturer at the Institute of Education in London, is equally adamant that coursework should not be abandoned, pointing out that its advantages far outweigh the potential drawbacks.

"The demands that coursework make in terms of students doing research and managing their own time are to be encouraged," he said.

Volunteer school helper Peter Jones agree. "Coursework allows the pupil to freely express a thought or idea, and benefits those pupils who have ability but do not like examination conditions," he explained.

Teachers also feel that internet research is something to be encouraged, as long as pupils know they are expected to quote any sources to which they refer and make it clear exactly from where passages have been taken.

"If a parent is willing to show interest, they can always read and examine each piece of work and ask to see the references for that particular work," said Jones.

Taylor explains that pupils cannot expect to get away with simply printing the results of an internet search. Instead, his school encourages its pupils to declare their sources in a bibliography at the end of anything they submit.

"If we ask pupils to do some research, we won't accept eight pages printed from Encarta or off the internet," he maintained. "But students can copy and paste sections into a word processor as long as they annotate it or put it in text boxes. There has to be evidence that they have processed the information."

Jones added: "It is important to explain the value of individual work over simply copying and quoting sources, but there is nothing wrong with working in a team, either."

Mee believes that every school will eventually have to install some sort of organised system to detect plagiarism as a backup to the teacher's intuition and also to make sure that students know exactly what is required of them when compiling coursework.

"Schools are thinking about developing guidelines, keeping work samples and having coursework moderated between two teachers," he said.

Plagiarism in higher education
While plagiarism is arguably only a minor problem in schools where teachers have close interaction with students on a daily basis, the same may not be true of universities and, to a lesser extent, sixth form colleges.

Most sixth form colleges still rely on daily lectures and textbooks to work through the syllabus, whereas university students spend less time in the classroom and more time accessing public resources such as libraries and journals.

However, university academics also insist that plagiarism in the form of students cutting and pasting from an internet resource, or downloading a pre-written essay, is still rare. Far more common than deliberately trying to pass off other people's work as their own are mistakes where the student copies passages into his or her work but fails to quote the source properly.

Professor Jonathan Bard teaches at the University of Edinburgh's College of Medicine and Veterinary Medicine, and is one of the college's academic misconduct officers. "There are two sorts of plagiarism. One is simply poor scholarship where the students don't realise they are doing it. This is trivial and usually happens because people don't cite sources properly. It shouldn't happen after the first year or two of the student's course," he said.

Confidential research conducted last year by graduate recruitment consultancy Fresh Minds appears to bear out this argument. (A PDF of the research can be found here.)

It indicates that only one per cent of students obtained essays from online essay banks. Less than a fifth admitted to having plagiarised a source more than once in the course of their studies, whether intentionally or unintentionally, although Fresh Minds calculated the detection rate to be only three per cent.

The sample consisted of 363 recent graduates; nine out of 10 were either studying at an institute of higher education at the time of answering or had completed their courses within the past four years.

Of those questioned, almost half said they did not think plagiarism was a problem at their institution, although one in five believed that plagiarism policies were not enforced strictly enough.

"Although there is a lot of hype around the use of internet essay banks, only a tiny minority of students have ever made use of them," Fresh Minds representative Annabel Kilner said in the survey.

JISC gets on the case
The Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) advises colleges and universities on the use of IT in courses and runs a Plagiarism Advisory Service. It says there are about 250 essay banks active on the internet at any one time, although most of them are aimed at US high school students.

JISC's plagiarism advisory service manager, Fiona Duggan, points out that there is plenty academic institutions can do to prevent internet-based plagiarism. "Essay bank subjects are very general, so teachers can set assignments based on specific topics that students have studied in class," she explained.

"Also, there are different ways of assessing student coursework, such as asking them to make a presentation or write reports and diaries, none of which they can copy from anywhere else."