Mar 14, 2006, 12:06 GMT
London - Plagiarism from the internet is rife among students at Britain's elite Oxford university and threatens to undermine the degree, the Daily Telegraph reported Tuesday.
Professor Alan Grafen, the senior proctor, who is the university's chief disciplinary officer, admitted to the problem, saying that a growing number of students were copying other people's work without acknowledgment.
The problem had become so serious that all students should be required to sign an affidavit for every piece of work they submitted, said Grafen, but acknowledged that it might not prove much of a deterrent.
Grafen laid much of the blame on schools for encouraging a practice of 'submitting work in class that is more or less cobbled together from the internet'.
'Rising generations thus arrive at university with an ingrained habit acquired through earlier encouragement and approval.'
Although only 10 cases of 'intentional or reckless' plagiarism were detected at Oxford last year, Grafen said the evidence suggested that 'the incidence exceeds the observed events, perhaps by a considerable margin, perhaps by a considerable multiple.'
'Hard though it may be to believe, students type word-for-word, and increasingly copy-and-paste from the internet, and submit essays containing whole pages of this verbatim material', he said according to the Telegraph.
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