A rather dubious league table
The Telegraph has a story based on reported incidences of plagiarism which it describes as an:
investigation into cheating at universities, with thousands of students caught plagiarising, trying to bribe lecturers and buying essays from the internet.
As noted in a previous post this issue is really about improved detection rather than a greater prevalence of cheats.
But, anyway, given that they’ve gone to all this effort, you might like to know that the top 10 looks like this:
| 2005/06 | 2009/10 | |||
| Greenwich | 540 | 838 | ||
| Sheffield Hallam | 117 | 801 | ||
| Kingston | n/a | 799 | ||
| Westminster | 840 | 749 | ||
| East London | n/a | 733 | ||
| Central Lancashire | n/a | 642 | ||
| Leeds Metropolitan | 157 | 532 | ||
| Wolverhampton | 360 | 498 | ||
| Coventry | 74 | 428 | ||
| Middlesex | 289 | 425 |
Bottom of the table
| 2005/06 | 2009/10 | |||
| Dundee | 0 | 0 | ||
| Cambridge | n/a | 1 | ||
| Bristol | 3 | 2 | ||
| Abertay Dundee | 19 | 5 | ||
| Durham | 2 | 5 | ||
| City | 4 | 7 | ||
| Leicester | 0 | 8 | ||
| Oxford | 11 | 12 | ||
| Essex | n/a | 18 | ||
| Birmingham | 15 | 20 | ||
| Sheffield | n/a | 20 |
Which, of course, proves absolutely nothing other than that different institutions have different ways of recording, reporting and dealing with plagiarism.
I think the amount of cheating has increased at the same level as the detection methods that catch people. Today it is so much easier to locate essays written on a whole range of topics and even easier to pay for essays written to exact specifications.
I’m glad to see my university wasn’t on there – assuming that it means that they didn’t cheat…not just that they didn’t get caught!