The Wales-Wide Web

I am increasingly concerned at the new moral outrage over plagiarism.

On September 12, the Observer said: "One of Britain's newest universities has found more than 200 students guilty of cheating after it launched a crackdown on what university officials admit is one of the biggest problems they face.

Using a computer program to catch students trying to pass off others' work as their own - often simply 'cut-and-pasted' from the internet - Coventry University discovered that 237 students had broken the rules. As a result, seven were expelled from the university, while another 12 cases are pending."

Are all these people really cheating.

On 12 September the Guardian reported: "The National Union of Students (NUS), vice-president, Wes Streeting, is becoming familiar with the problem. "We are coming across an increasing number of cases where students have been accused of plagiarism when it's not obvious that the accusation is justified," he says.

"A big problem is that students are not being told what plagiarism is, or how to avoid it. Students may be referencing an author in the bibliography, but not in footnotes. We are also being told of huge differences in the way that departments within the same university are dealing with the issue."

Ian Beak (not his real name) has just graduated from Birmingham University. He was accused of plagiarism in his second year. Two diagrams in an essay had not been footnoted in the text.

"They were referenced in the bibliography, but not on the page. I was accused of plagiarism, which I wasn't very happy about. I wasn't given the opportunity to discuss it; the accusation was made and I had marks deducted, which caused me to fail the module," explains Beak."

Many years ago when I was at university we did not have computers. Library searches were done through card index systems (although the new technical wonder of microfiches was just being introduced. If we had an essay to do, we were given a booklist by the lecturer. This nearly always included the lecturers own writings on the subject. We read or skim read the books - or those of us saving time to spend on other things (drinking, politics) read the introduction and conclusion. And then we paraphrased the contents to linked them together in our essays. This was not only tolerated but was the expected way for us to learn.

We did not reference our essays - rather we put a reading list at the end - and if you were clever you made it impressive whether or not you had read the books (which half the time ere unobtainable anyway because the library did not have enough copies.

Today the standard is much higher. My daughter - who is doing an undergraduate course in history in Aberystwyth University college is expected to fully reference her texts. It seems to me the standard of research for undergraduate essays is much higher (and she is doing history - the same subject I studied at university. students are using the internet in just the same way we paraphrased books. Yet the moral panic has taken over yet again - and it just isn't needed.

Yes - there is a problem with sites writing essays on demand for poor little rich kids whop do not want to learn. This comes from yet another Guardian article on August 1: "Calls from teachers and lecturers for a plethora of internet sites to be investigated have been rejected by the government's exam watchdog, although officials are said to be concerned. More than 15,000 students are estimated to have signed up to one website alone, which charges £9.99 for access to tens of thousands of assignments.

Another, Academic Answers Ltd, based in Nottingham, runs five websites and receives 800 requests a week for tailor-made essays. Barclay Littlewood, director of AAL, said that demand was so great that his firm could only meet around half of these orders. The newly formed company made £400,000 in its first year's trading, with Littlewood expecting this to double by next year. 'We're expecting 50 per cent of last year's customer to return, on top of new ones,' he said.

Of the company's websites, ukessays.com is the biggest, receiving 240,000 hits a year. The company charges £50 for a pre-written essay, and anywhere between £200 and £5,000 for an original piece. "

Even this is not new. We often shared essays to help each other out. And you could always commission an essay off another student. But the answer to this seems easy. Don't chase the students - just ban the sites - or make the 'service' they offer illegal. These people are parasites.

Then lets end the moral panic

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