Teachers struggling to identify plagiarism

More than half the respondents in a survey of UK teachers said they thought plagiarism from the Internet is a problem.

Some students who steal essays wholesale from the Web, they said, are so lazy they don't even bother to delete advertisements from the cut-and-pasted text.

Fifty-eight per cent of the teachers interviewed in a questionnaire presented by the Association of Teachers and Lecturers, an educators' union in the UK, had come across plagiarism among their sixth-form pupils -- those who are in their final two years of secondary education.

Among their comments:

• Gill Bullen, a teacher at Itchen College in Southampton, said pieces handed in by two students were identical and "significantly better than either of them could have done".

"Not only that, the essays given in didn't quite answer the title question I had set."

• "I had one piece of work so blatantly cut and pasted that it still contained adverts from the Web page," said a teacher from Leeds, in West Yorkshire.

• "With less able students it is easy to spot plagiarism, as the writing style changes mid-assignment, but with more able students it is sometimes necessary for tutors to carry out Internet research to identify the source of the plagiarism," said Connie Robinson, a teacher from Stockton Riverside College, on Stockton on Tees.

• "Teachers are struggling under a mountain of cut-and-pasting to spot whether work was the student's own or plagiarism," said Mary Bousted, general secretary of the ATL.

Bousted called for robust policies to combat plagiarism, and asked for help from exam boards and the government in providing resources and techniques to detect cheats.

The 58 per cent of teachers who said plagiarism was a problem estimated that more than a quarter of the work returned by their pupils included plagiarism.

But there was another side.

"I have found once students clearly understand what plagiarism is, its consequences, and how to reference correctly so they can draw on published works, plagiarism becomes less of a problem," said Diana Baker from Emmanuel College, Durham.

"I think the majority of students who engage in plagiarism do it more out of ignorance than the desire to cheat. They really want to succeed on their own merit."

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