Universities obsessed with 'delivering a product' and audit trickery should not be shocked at student plagiarism, argues Bob Brecher
Student cheating is exercising us all these days. Plagiarism appears to be so common that we now have software to detect it. But it is not just plagiarism: anything from undergraduate essays to doctorates are electronically available, off the shelf or tailor-made, from about £50. Of course, whenever academics confront these enterprising entrepreneurs, they understandably get very heated about the "cheating industry": it is dishonest; it undermines the very idea of academic standards; it makes a farce of education. Indeed it is; and indeed it does.
But that is the easy bit. As the traders point out, we ourselves do not seem clear about what is and what is not plagiarism - especially when it comes to keeping dropout rates down and pass rates up - or terribly good at spotting whether an essay has been written or bought. No amount of indignant fulmination can get away from the truth of that.
Perhaps we should ask ourselves why students find cheating increasingly attractive. The answer is pretty obvious. First, we do not take undergraduates' writing seriously. Sometimes those who teach the course and set the essay do not mark it at all - it is "outsourced". Even where we do mark the work we set, how many universities still have tutorials, where students' work can be discussed (and any unfamiliarity with what they have "written" emerge)? Sometimes we take the opposite tack: students submit drafts of essays or dissertations that they then rewrite in response to tutors' comments. Fine: but how often do marking standards differentiate these from those submitted for assessment "neat"?
Second, we are not setting an example that might lead students to listen to our objections to cheating. Both plagiarism and an "imaginative" conception of authorship are so rife that "software used to catch student cheats may soon be employed by journal publishers to help detect duplication and plagiarism by researchers" ("Anti-cheat software turned on academe", The Times Higher , May ). But it goes deeper than that. The structures of academe have been so corrupted by the audit culture that cheating has become an academic duty rather than a failing. "Star researchers are being offered extra research leave, funds to attend major international conferences and relief from teaching duties" ("Star staff cosseted in bid to up RAE rating", The Times Higher , May 20): is that not cheating? Or what about the Glazer approach to football that, as we all know, has become the norm in today's universities too? If you think that is an exaggeration, just turn back to "Top scorers play dirty in RAE game" ( ibid .), where "all the tricks described" are based on real RAE-beating practices "reported to The Times Higher ". How can we ask, or expect, students not to cheat when we are busily playing the commercial game ourselves?
If universities see themselves as "delivering" a "product", then a product is exactly what students are going to buy. If the only point of getting an education is to get a "certificate of competence", and the only point of that to get a job, then why not simply pay for it? Why go through the stress of learning anything - especially when getting these certificates "legitimately" bears less and less relation to knowing anything anyway? Why not go straight to the real "Degrees-R-Us" rather than bother with the scarcely less dishonest imitations universities are becoming? If we want to be serious about cheating, we need to look in the mirror.
Bob Brecher is reader in moral philosophy, Brighton University.