Extracts from the Education Section of the Daily Telegraph, 16 June 2004 and subsequently. Written by John Clare.


Plagiarism with a shrug and a laugh

I WONDER if your readers understand how thoroughly corrupted higher education has become. At the university where I teach, which is in the top half of the league tables, plagiarism and other forms of cheating are now endemic. Students routinely submit essays they've bought on the internet. So riddled is their course work with unacknowledged chunks of other people's work that we have to pass it all through an electronic screen in the hope of detecting the more egregious examples of plagiarism. And when they're found out, they just shrug and laugh it off, as if being caught is simply an occupational hazard. The truth is that most of our students are here not because they want to learn anything but because going to university has become a hoop they think they've got to go through - and the less effort it involves, the better.

Hardly any of the 200 exam papers I've finished marking do more than regurgitate the lecture notes that are helpfully posted on our department's website. After 25 years of university teaching, I have never felt so dispirited. Colleagues at other universities tell me their experiences are the same, and yet little of this seems to be reflected in the public debate about higher education. Why do you suppose that is?

Very few academics dare speak out like this, either for fear of losing their jobs or from concern about their institutions' image. Others, no doubt, reckon that the battle to preserve the integrity of higher education is already lost. To those who don't, I offer this anonymity.

It is worth recalling that, in a speech last month, Tony Blair said: "We were constantly told - and from some quarters, we are still being told - that more means worse. That results only rise when there is dumbing down. That expanding higher education undermines the universities and is of no benefit to the students themselves. I utterly reject all these backward-looking, reactionary attitudes."

I look forward to hearing from backward-looking reactionaries.


Inflate degree results, or else

My experience of academic corruption is very similar to that described by your recent correspondents. I teach engineering at a "new" university - by reputation, one of the worst in the country. Driven by the need to recruit students, we are little more than a degree factory, effectively selling devalued qualifications and defrauding our "customers" in the process. Not only have we dumbed down the curriculum to accommodate those who are incapable of understanding the discipline's basic principles (we admit students who haven't even passed GCSE maths), we "massage" their marks to ensure they graduate. Routinely, a mark of 25 per cent is increased to 40 per cent - a process we call "moderation". Also, instead of requiring students to pass the coursework and examination components separately, we aggregate the total, which allows them to pass on coursework alone, significantly increasing the opportunities for cheating. Those of us whose pass rates fall below the management's target are warned - or threatened - that our jobs will be at risk if we don't conform. Please preserve my anonymity: I need the money to pay my children's school fees so they don't end up at a university like mine.

Thank you. A point emphasised by many who have written in similar terms is that the pressure to dumb down standards comes not just from university managements, but the newly enfranchised "customers". Through the medium of anonymous questionnaires - "the sacred cows of university teaching" - students who thought they were "entitled to an upper second without getting out of bed" were invited to write "poison pen letters" about lecturers whom they considered overly demanding.

On the other hand, Michael McManus, a lecturer at Leeds Metropolitan, claimed that such letters showed merely that I had "tapped into the moaning culture that can be found in all public sector workplaces". Plagiarism, he added, was easily discovered, easily dealt with and confined to first-year students. "Your correspondents who claim otherwise are liars."

Dave Andress, who teaches modern European history at Portsmouth, said: "We never stoop to fictitious marks, collusion with failing students or any of the other shameful practices highlighted in your column. Those who do probably don't know how to teach properly."

A Cambridge don, who wanted to "counter-balance the doom and gloom" I had been hearing from other universities, said relying on traditional final exams and ensuring that students were closely supervised by tutors who knew them well had enabled Cambridge to maintain standards. He regretted, though, the grade inflation that had resulted from the fiction that a first from Cambridge was the same as one from Luton.


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