Crime and prevention: plagiarism

Student academic misconduct is a serious problem for higher education institutions. The quality of an institution’s awards relies on assessing the student’s academic performance, not their ability to cut and paste, collude, cheat or pay for essays. Misconduct – in all its forms – is an endemic problem: self-report studies indicate that 70 per cent of students engage in misconduct over the course of their studies. With the increasing size and diversity of the student body, staff find misconduct difficult and time-consuming to detect and manage.