Universities in crackdown on 'cut and paste culture'

By Graeme Paton. The number of students caught cheating in university essays has more than halved following a major crackdown on the “cut and paste culture”, it emerged today. New figures show that eight per cent of work submitted by undergraduates in 2005 was made up of a significant amount of “plagiarised content”.
But by 2012, the proportion of essays and dissertations in which more than three-quarters words were copied from a book or academic thesis had more than halved to just three per cent. The move comes after universities launched a major drive a decade ago to prevent students cheating by attempting to pass off other academics’ work as their own.

Institutions combined to form the Plagiarism Advisory Service and were given free access to “Turnitin” cheating software, which scans students’ work and compares it to a database featuring hundreds of millions of academic articles, journals and books. Read more...