Ask any employer in the UK which school they’d like like to hire someone from and the answer would almost be guaranteed to be Oxford or Cambridge. So with such a learned place held in high esteem by people all over the world, it’s a surprise to learn that half of all students attending Cambridge openly admit to having plagiarized, and the other half are probably liars.

When I was at school, the Internet wasn’t really around, at least not in its current form where it’s available to every man, woman and child in reach of a computer. So while some fellow pupils copied passages of text from books, most of us just got our heads down and did our work.

I didn’t go to Cambridge University, not that I tried, although I doubt if I’d have make it in even if I had. But thousands of young people leave school each year holding a longing in their hearts to attend the age-old colleges which have been home to some of the greatest minds ever to have graced the world of academia.

While only the best of the best (and those with parents with connections) make it each year, that doesn’t mean they’re not adverse to cheating like the rest of us. According to BBC News, 49 percent of Cambridge students recently responded to a survey by admitting having plagiarized at some time in their University career.

One thousand students were questioned in the online poll by student newspaper Varsity, and while almost half admitted cheating, only one in 20 said they’d ever been caught doing so. Most of those polled had used the Internet as a means to cheat, while other options included handing in other people’s work as their own, or even buying a completed essay.

Wikipedia unsurprisingly came out on top in terms of the Internet destinations used by students to cheat, with 82 percent of respondents admitting to having taken material from the site. Which is a worrying thought because Wikipedia is sometimes glaringly short on fact and high on opinion or hearsay.

The problem is that the Web makes it all too easy to cheat these days. By Googling the title of the essay you are working on, a whole host of options are likely to present themselves to you, including whole pieces of work which can be copied and used as your own. And the chances of getting caught are obviously not that high.

I just wish the Internet had been in existence when I was at school. Maybe then I would have made it to Cambridge after all.

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Entry was posted on Sunday, November 2nd, 2008 at 9:38 pm under Internet, Opinion, Technology.

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