Article in the Daily Telegraph, 17 July 2003 by Liz Lightfoot, Education Correspondent

Plagiarism is soaring as students crib from the internet

UNIVERSITIES have reported a huge rise in plagiarism among students who take material from the internet and present it as their own.

A survey of universities found 1,600 cases this year. Lecturers say the problem is being fuelled by student debt. Faced with the repayment of thousands of pounds on graduation, students are desperate for good degrees which lead to better-paid jobs. More than 200 colleges are using software that checks the student's work against 1.8 billion items of submitted material and websites.

Three quarters of the 31 universities that responded to the survey, conducted by Radio 4's The World at One, said there was much more plagiarism than 10 years ago. Essex University said it had gone up by a quarter this year. Moira Collett, its academic registrar, said: "It worries us because it is a very time-consuming activity to deal with and it shows that the students' approach to their education is not as good as it should be.

"The financial pressure students are under is inevitably one of the causes."

A second-year criminology student, named only as Jane, told the programme yesterday that she had been caught. "I was a bit panicked and stressed I realised I had some articles off the internet saved on my computer. I just cut and pasted them and put them throughout my essay. I knew it was wrong, but I was rushed."