Mike Hart
Professor of Business and Informatics
University College, Winchester, UK
Email: M.Hart@winchester.ac.uk (work)
mikehart@unforgettable.com (home)
Phone: 01962 827323
In recent years, not only has there been an explosion in the numbers of web pages posted but institutions of higher education have increasingly encouraged students to exploit such resources in order to research assignments, essays and projects. Commensurate with these developments has come an increasing concern in the academic community with the ease with which it is possible to download material and use substantive portions of such material in assessed work. The true nature of the extent and severity of plagiarism or poor academic practice is hard to discern with accuracy, although one author (Carroll, 2002) cites studies that found that almost two thirds of students admitted plagiarism.
The reasons for this phenomenon could be said to lie not only in the accessibility of material itself but also in the increasing massification of higher education in which one third of the relevant age-cohort now enter higher education, a proportion which the government intends to raise to 50% within the foreseeable future. Many of the new entrants to higher education will not have been exposed to traditional academic skills (particularly if entering via a route such as GNVQ) and may experience a pressure to succeed with exceeds the skill levels with which they enter higher education. As a consequence of the same massification, teachers in higher education now have vastly increased marking loads and cannot afford the considerable amount of time involved in the detection and administrative consequences that flow from the detection of plagiarised work.
This paper will argue that punitive approaches to poor academic practice do not tackle the problem at its source. Rather, it is imperative that as professional educators we recognise that poor academic practice is an issue to which explicit attention needs to be paid and that penalties, whilst necessary, are applied to those students who knowingly and deliberately transgress academic standards. It is important that policies designed to ameliorate poor academic practice need to be woven into a larger web of practices including accurate citation and referencing conventions, the boundaries for individual work as opposed to group work, the encouragement of individualised critical thinking styles and an ability to recognise and critique the quality of material found on the web.
The paper suggests some practical policies which may assist the e-learning process and set a climate of opinion in which plagiarism is seen as unnecessary. Such policies will rely not only upon the assent of a teaching group but also a consistency in application such that the student body will internalise messages that are reinforced in all of their submitted course work. It is anticipated that a survey of student opinion may illuminate the circumstances in which poor academic practice might occur and itself suggest further solutions.
Carroll, J. (2002), A Handbook for Deterring Plagiarism in Higher Education, Oxford: Oxford Centre for Staff and Learning Development, Oxford Brookes University.