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Internet cheats

THE JOURNAL (Newcastle, UK) BYLINE: By Graeme Whitfield, The Journal SECTION: EDUCATION SCHOOLS, Pg.

1 LENGTH: 1019 words After private schools called for GCSE coursework to be scrapped to deter internet cheats, education correspondent Graeme we look at how widespread plagiarism has become in the classroom.

********** From passing notes in class to copying the clever kid's homework, cheating in schools is nothing new.

Teachers have been trying to stop children cheating for almost as long as they have been teaching them.

But cheating in the 21st Century has become a high-tech business.

This week the nation's private schools called for GCSE coursework to be scrapped because of the increasing number of students downloading essays and assignments from the internet.

Thousands of essay banks and coursework sites have sprung up on the internet in recent years, with A-grade papers just a few clicks of a button away from computer-literate teenagers.

With pressure to produce top grades growing on both pupils and schools, the temptation to pass off someone else's work is high.

External markers, who have no idea of an individual student's writing style, often have no way of differentiating between copied and original work.

The problem of internet copying is so great among undergraduates that the country's universities and colleges have set up a monitoring unit in Newcastle to check students' submissions for originality.

That resource is beyond the reach of most schools, however, and many headteachers are now saying that, while honest students are being cheated by those passing off internet intelligence as their own, the only solution is to scrap coursework altogether.

James Miller, head of Newcastle's prestigious Royal Grammar School, yesterday endorsed the call from the Independent Schools Council for coursework to be scrapped.

He pointed out that with universities having to employ anti-plagiarism software, schools had next to no chance of catching out the cheats at GCSE level.

"There are websites where you can buy coursework off the shelf.

That's just crazy." Thousands of websites now exist offering ready-made coursework in subjects from Anthropology to Zoology.

Some sites sell their essays, while on others work can be accessed for free.

Some even offer to tailor the work to fit past records of grades, saying that that way the cheating will be harder to spot.

For teenagers who have grown up regarding the internet as a huge on-line library, the temptation to take work from the web and pass it off as their own has often proved too strong.

In 1999, more than 100 computer science students at Edinburgh University had their marks reduced after an instance of "mass cheating" in a coursework assignment using the internet.

Three years later, students at a Canadian university were accused of cheating in ironically enough an ethics exam.

The Plagiarism Advisory Service, serving Britain's universities and colleges and based at the University of Northumbria, now has anti-plagiarism software that can be used to identify when opinions have been lifted.

The software can check students' essays against a database of other student work, essays from cheat sites, information in a number of books and academic journals, and more than 1.8bn websites.

If individual sentences in a student's essay have obviously been "cut and pasted" from the internet, the software will highlight the offending material, giving tutors the opportunity to query its provenance.

According to Dr Fiona Duggan, manager of the Plagiarism Advisory Service, much of the problem stems from the belief among young people that the internet is a no-limits source of information.

"Cheating is nothing new," she said.

"But what is causing concern is that there is now so much information available to students and pupils, and a lot of them don't seem to understand that they need to show where they've got things from.

"They understand that if they're copying something from a book or a journal they have to acknowledge that.

There's less appreciation that it's just the same when information comes from a website.

"It's part of a wider culture.

Teenagers are downloading music files and sharing them left, right and centre with their friends.

"They think it's the same with essays." She added: "When coursework questions are set, everyone knows what they're doing and how to find information.

The questions are often general enough for people to be able to find some sort of answer on an essay bank.

"If we make the questions more personal or encourage students to bring their own agenda to bear, that's the sort of thing you can't just download off an essay bank." Coursework was introduced in A-levels and GCSE's to reward those children who learnt well over the whole of their course, rather than being good at memorising facts and regurgitating them in the exam hall.

Many educationalists believe it is a better way of appraising a student's knowledge than a final exam, but if internet cheating cannot be stamped out, the pressure will grow for it to be scrapped.

John Heslop, regional officer for the National Association of Headteachers, said: "Coursework is important so youngsters can be rewarded for sustained effort rather than remembering loads of facts and then sitting down in the exam hall and spieling the stuff out.

I did that for O-level history and got a B grade but I know nothing about history.

"But the problem with coursework is that it does lend itself to accusations of plagiarism and people taking short cuts." The Joint Information and Systems Committee is the public body set up by the Government to crack down on plagiarism in the country's universities and colleges.

Executive secretary Malcolm Read said: 'We may not be able to solve the problem of plagiarism completely but institutions need to be seen to take the issue of plagiarism seriously in order to uphold the credibility of their accreditation." But the Government's own record in this area is questionable after its heavy use of a research thesis for the so-called "dodgy dossier" on Iraq.

As Mr Heslop points out: "If 10 Downing Street can plagiarise off the internet, so can teenagers."