The entrepreneurial spirit is strong and growing at British universities. A survey of 84 universities has revealed a depressing picture of the extent to which plagiarism, impersonation and bribery has entered the mainstream of university life. The Telegraph reports:
image:soniceclectic.com
A cheating epidemic is sweeping universities with thousands of students caught plagiarising, trying to bribe lecturers and buying essays from the internet.
A survey of more than 80 universities has revealed that academic misconduct is soaring at institutions across the country.
More than 17,000 incidents of cheating were recorded by universities in the 2009-10 academic year – up at least 50 per cent in four years. But the true figure will be far higher because many were only able to provide details of the most serious cases and let lecturers deal with less serious offences. Only a handful of students were expelled for their misdemeanours among those universities which disclosed how cheats were punished.
Most of the incidents were plagiarism in essays and other coursework, but others examples include:
- Three cases categorised as “impersonation” by Derby University and three at Coventry, along with 10 “uses of unauthorised technology”
- Kent University reported at least one case where a student attempted to “influence a teacher or examiner improperly”.
- At the University of East Anglia students submitted pieces of work which contained identical errors, while others completed reports which were “almost identical to that of another student”, a spokesman said, while one was caught copying sections from the Wikipedia website.
- A student sitting an exam at the University of the West of Scotland was caught with notes stored in an MP3 player.
- * A Bradford University undergraduate completed work at home, smuggled it into an examination then claimed it had been written during the test.
- The University of Central Lancashire, at Preston, reported students had been caught using a “listening and/or communications device” during examinations.
- Keele undergraduates sitting exams were found to have concealed notes in the lavatory, stored on a mobile telephone and written on tissues while two students were found guilty of “falsifying a mentor’s signature on practice assessment documents to gain academic benefit”. …
…. The survey exposed for the first time a huge leap in the number of incidents compared with just four years earlier, with a 53 per cent jump from 9,100 to 14,200 among the 70 institutions able to provide comparable data.
Cheating was reported widely among undergraduates but there were also significant numbers reported among postgraduates. For example, Loughborough reported 151 incidents last year of which 43 were committed by postgraduates. …
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