Plagiarism has been acknowledged to be a growing
problem for Higher Education Institutions, and indeed in
other areas of society. Various reasons have been advanced
to explain the growth of this problem, including
improvements in IT in general and the Internet in
particular, along with changed attitudes towards study
amongst some of today’s students. Improved access to the
Internet, combined with the development of simple-to-use
search tools such as Google, have enabled students quickly
and easily to locate relevant material, while improvements
in IT training have meant that a greater number of students
possess the skills for copying, pasting and reformatting text.
In addition a number websites have sprung up offering for
sale essays and dissertations to order.
Universities have sought to combat plagiarism by making
use of text matching tools linked to databases of essays
and other content to track down plagiarists. They have
also sought to educate both students and staff about what
is meant by plagiarism and how to avoid it. This paper
describes the experience of one department in a university
that has been running a pilot project using the Turnitin
software available via JISCiPAS (the JISC Internet Plagiarism
Advisory Service) as part of an anti-plagiarism initiative.
The discussion also reports on a research project that is
underway in the department which seeks to set the
problem of plagiarism in an economic context.