How do I stop my children copying homework projects from the net?

Computers and the internet have helped revolutionise the way in which children and adults learn. With its roots in academia, it is not surprising that the internet has become such a positive force for education.

But there are downsides. The most obvious negative element is the rise of a new kind of classroom cheating: online plagiarism. However, there are ways to curb the copycats and in this article we will explain how.

How is plagiarism committed?
Plagiarism is not a new phenomenon, but thanks to the internet it has never been so easy to pull off.

There are millions of academic, research and exam papers online, along with encyclopaedias and experts to contact.

A student merely needs to run an internet search or have access to another student’s research in order to copy and paste single sentences or whole chunks of someone else’s work into their own.

Even if you ask a question online and cut and paste the answer instead of rewriting it, this is considered plagiarism. There are even people online, who, for a fee, will write an essay or paper for students.

Who are the culprits?
Plagiarism usually becomes a problem at secondary school. A survey released in January 2008 by the Association of Teachers and Lecturers showed that 58 per cent of teachers think internet plagiarism is a major problem among sixth-form pupils.

But Barry Calvert of Plagiarism advice, an organisation that gives advice on plagiarism to schools and colleges, believes that “it is not really a case of the problem being worse at one level or another”.

He says it’s more a case that “bad practice and poor research technique learned early on in a student’s academic career can lead to serious issues at university”.

Essays or papers where someone else’s work is used in part to highlight a point or argument is not plagiarism provided it is correctly referenced.

In one case an A-level English student submitted work he had copied from a website and failed to credit the work properly. While that is certainly poor practice, it could also have been an accidental omission. However, the teacher, who should have known better and corrected the student, added the reference after the work was submitted.

So it is not surprising when Dr Judith Rowbotham, a historian at Nottingham Trent University, says that “the real problem we have at universities is that students don’t come to us with an understanding of what constitutes plagiarism”.