Half of university students also prepared to submit essays bought off
internet, according to research
Rachel Williams
Monday June 21 2010
The Guardian
http://www.guardian.co.uk/education/2010/jun/20/internet-plagiarism-rising-in-schools
The number of schools using plagiarism-detecting computer software to
catch A-level students cheating in their coursework has rocketed, amid
warnings that children as young as 11 need to be taught not to copy
and paste from the internet.
Nearly 90 schools and more than 130 colleges now use the Turnitin
database to cross-check pupils' work with material found online ?
double the numbers two years ago.
Barry Calvert, of nLearning [http://nlearning.co.uk/" title="], which
provides the software, said sixth-form heads believed young people
needed to be tutored as early as year 7 in how to formally credit and
reference sources, rather than just taking chunks of text off the
internet and passing it off as their own.
The figures come at the beginning of a three-day international
conference [http://www.plagiarismadvice.org/conference"
title="conference details]into plagiarism at Northumbria University,
where experts from around the world will share ideas for catching
cheats. The conference, organised by the nLearning-funded Plagiarism
Advice Service, will hear how new research suggests that half of
university students would be prepared to submit essays bought off the
internet.
Dan Rigby, an economics lecturer at Manchester University, questioned
90 second- and third-year students at three universities and found
they would be prepared to pay more than ?300 for a first-class essay, ?
217 for a piece of work worth a 2:1 and ?164 for a 2:2.
Rigby said: "Although the sample of students is small, the results are
indicative, statistically robust and rather disturbing." He also found
that 45% of students were certain a peer had cheated during an essay,
report, test or exam in the past year.
Earlier this year the exams regulator, Ofqual [http://
www.ofqual.gov.uk/" title="Ofqual], revealed that an increase in the
number of pupils trying to cheat in their GCSEs and A-levels using
mobile phones and MP3 players led to penalties for malpractice rising
by 6% in a year.
Students received more than 4,400 penalties in 2009, and the number
handed out by staff was up 29%.
Most universities in the UK already use Turnitin, but are telling
school heads it is their responsibility to teach students referencing
skills, Calvert said. "There's been a lot of push back from higher
education saying it's up to schools to have children prepared when
they come to us so they understand how to do this," he said.
"We need to get students to understand that the internet is not just
some kind of information smorgasbord you can turn to ? it's actually
somebody's work that needs to be credited and sourced in the same way
as you would other sources," he said.
But the internet also has a positive effect on learning, Calvert
added.
"When I was a child our local library used to be sick of the sight of
us saying 'has that book come back yet?' because there was only one
book on the Vikings or the Romans. So on the one hand the internet has
opened up a greater opportunity for everybody to learn, but on the
other it's created that opportunity for people to just cut and paste."
The conference will also hear that the problem of plagiarism at
university could be reduced if students used "digitial storytelling" -
creating packages of images and voiceovers - rather than essays to
explain their learning from an imagined personal perspective.
Phil Davies, senior lecturer at Glamorgan university's computing
school, said he had been using the technique for two years and had not
seen any evidence of cheating. "Students find it really hard but it's
very rewarding, because they're not copying and writing an essay, they
have to think about it and bring their research into a personal
presentation."
guardian.co.uk Copyright (c) Guardian News and Media Limited. 2010
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