You cannot pass.

A long time ago, in a university not far away, I once had occasion to call two students to my office. When they arrived I handed them the essays they had written (typed, because in the latter years all that stuff came in word-processed – the first time I saw their handwriting was the final exams and it was often a shock).

I handed the essays to them the wrong way around. “Oh,” they said, “I have hers and she has mine,” and they swapped.

“How can you tell?” I asked. They were, word for word, identical. Now, you would expect them to be red-faced and admit one had copied from the other but that is not what happened – because they hadn’t.

This was where I swung the computer monitor round to show a probiotics company website page with, word for word, identical text to their essays on probiotics.

“Which of you wrote that?” This time, their faces gained a colour that would make beetroot envious.Time for the killer line (and yes, I did enjoy this part).

“Well, someone in this room wrote it.”

They didn’t get it. I had to explain. They had copied and pasted the text of an article I had penned for a company. Having paid me for the work, the company were free to use that text any way they wanted without attribution. Pay me to write and the work is yours. I’ll sign over copyright if the price is right and then I’ll write something else. I never sign over absolute copyright to fiction (nobody should) but science is different. If you’re doing science right you’ll never do the same work again because you’re supposed to progress to the next stage, journals need to hold copyright so that your work is available permanently to everyone, and nobody will ever make a Hollywood film of a scientific paper.

Oh, I just imagined a Hollywood film of a scientific paper and now I want to cut someone’s wrists.

Actually, my name was on the article, if they had bothered to look at the small print. This wasn’t an isolated incident and it wasn’t just my work that was copy/pasted into assessment papers.

Students never seemed to grasp a simple truth. They take a range of classes with a range of lecturers but each lecturer works intensely in one narrow subject area. If someone is lecturing you at B.Sc. level on a subject then it is fair to assume that they have read – and written – pretty widely on that subject. That started to change in the early 2000s with lecturers assigned to fields they knew nothing about and that might have been deliberate, but at the time I was lecturing I could spot a plagiarised article in one of my subject areas, look it up in my own reference database and produce the original. Not just mine. Most of the published work in the fields I was interested in was in my database (Lotus 1, which worked well on two floppy disks on an 8086, so put it on a 486 and it will find files before you know you need them. Unfortunately the change in the Windows filesystem buggered it up).

If you, as a student, can find an excellent text on the subject you are assigned to write about, isn’t it more than a fair bet that your lecturer, whose whole career is based around that subject, has seen it? They might even have written it!

In the Old Days, when I was a student, those trying the plagiarism trick had to go to the library and copy it longhand from books. Doing that with no input from your own thoughts and ideas is impossible unless you are a robot. There were some…

Now, students can go to Google, type in their search words and copy/paste the first relevant article they find. Many don’t even read it. At least those who copied it by hand had to read it. It passed through their brains, admittedly often unhindered by anything more than cobwebs and dust, but it did pass through.

Now all they see is the title. Even back then, they didn’t bother to look at the author’s name so it’s very unlikely they do now. Cheating among students is increasing for a number of reasons and the biggest one is that it is now so much easier than it used to be. Read the first paragraph or two, decide it’s relevant and then highlight, copy, paste.

When it was done by hand it was almost inevitable that the student’s own thoughts on the subject would come through. Now it’s done by copy/paste there is no thought involved at all. You cannot pass when your brain isn’t even in gear.

Those students should have failed. I wasn’t allowed to fail them, I had to make them redo the essay.

One handed in another copy/paste of someone else’s article.

I’m glad I’m not a lecturer now.