Have you ever felt the strain when the coursework deadline is near, the subject is difficult and you’d rather be doing something else? Have you ever been tempted to take a shortcut to get your work done? Have you ever CHEATED?

All students know about cheating. Every year new students are told about the hazards of plagiarism. “Lecturers are actually very good at detecting plagiarism,” says Dr Keith Pilbeam, a senior economics lecturer at City University. “We tend to know our subjects and easily recognise something that’s been copied from a book. We have our ‘secret weapons’.”

But plagiarism isn’t just copying from textbooks. Downloading essays from the web, copying other students’ essays or making others write your essay is also plagiarism. “Lecturers are well aware of the possibilities of the web,” Dr. Pilbeam continues. “We have programs that can search and match extracts of texts. I think we are quite successful in detecting plagiarism, but we probably don’t catch all.”

“I’ve cheated on a couple of occasions,”, admits Catherine, a second-year sociology student at a London university. “A friend has done the same course before me, and because the lecturers give the same essay questions every year I’ve copied her essays. I was quite nervous but never got caught. I think lots of students do this.”

Dr Pilbeam admits that it’s difficult to find out whether a student has re-used an essay from a former student. “The best way to avoid such cases is to change essay questions every year. Most lecturers do this, but I guess there are exceptions.”

Penalties for plagiarism vary between different universities and departments. In general, you risk getting a ‘zero’ on the coursework if you get caught. In most cases you will be allowed to write another essay, but you can only get a maximum 40 per cent mark. “If a first-year student is caught plagiarising we’re not that strict,” says Dr. Pilbeam. “Sometimes new students don’t completely understand the concept of plagiarism. It can be difficult to decide whether the student cheated deliberately or not.”

However, cheating on the final year project is a whole other matter. “When the mark counts for a degree it’s much worse. It can affect the student’s degree classification.” Cases of students cheating on the final project seem to be relatively rare. City University’s Economics Department discovers one or two cases every year. “The student gets the chance of re-doing it, but the maximum mark will only be 40 per cent. The cheating won’t necessarily show on the degree, but if the student asks for a reference it won’t be as enthusiastic as it would have been otherwise,” says Dr Pilbeam. To detect cheating on projects, most universities follow up all students throughout the year to check how a project is progressing and also ask students to show the notes if they suspect anything.

“I will definitely get someone else to do my project”, says Jo, a European student studying psychology in London. “I don’t know if I can afford it, but I’ll try. I want a good degree.” Jo says that she has always relied on others to do her coursework. “I usually get friends to help, but I know several people who pay their old teachers to do the essays for them. A friend of mine just paid £200 for a 2000-word essay. I think it’s very common among European students to do this. All the people I know paid to get through the IELTS” (an English test all foreign students must pass to qualify for British universities).

Barbara Norden, a journalism lecturer at City University, was once approached by a student wanting her to do his coursework. “He was from another university and willing to pay a lot of money if I did his essays, but naturally I declined. As a lecturer I would never do it, and besides, writing someone else’s coursework must be very boring. I doubt any lecturer would be tempted.”

Dr Pilbeam agrees. “I don’t know of any cases where a lecturer at a British university has done a student’s coursework. I don’t think any reputable lecturer would do anything like that, even for great sums of money,” says Dr Pilbeam.

However, Dr Pilbeam isn’t aware that some foreign students get their old teachers to do their coursework. “I’ll certainly make a note of that. My concern is for the students. The penalty for plagiarism is not worth the price”, he says. “It is almost always the weaker students who cheat, and they merely punish themselves by not learning what they’re supposed to. At the end of the day, they still have to do the exam.”

No matter what ‘secret weapons’ or penalties universities have, cheating seems to be happening whether they like it or not. But do students think about the moral issue or worry about the exams? “I know it’s immoral, and I wouldn’t do it on all my essays,” says Catherine. “I have to learn something to pass the exams.”

Jo doesn’t worry about exams even though she doesn’t write any essays herself. “I learn better from reading the essays someone else has written for me. They’re much better than my essays would have been and it saves me a lot of time. There is no way they can catch me. I don’t copy from other students or from textbooks, and I don’t get the essays off any web page. I just pay for a genuine essay. How can the lecturer ever find out it’s not my work?”

Stine Okkelmo is a BA Journalism student at City University, London

The students’ names and courses have been changed.

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