The internet is surprisingly not making cheats out of us all

With its powerful search engines, exhaustively researched Wikipedia pages and websites offering ready-made essays for a fee, it is no wonder the internet is often blamed for making plagiarism all too easy.

But according to a study in the Journal for Academic Ethics, cheating was just as rife in the pre-internet era. When 184 doctoral dissertations written before 1994 were selected at random and compared with 184 written after 2010, about half of each group was found to contain some degree of unattributed material.

However, when measured with TurnItIn plagiarism detection software, the mean similarity index for older papers was, at 14.5 per cent, found to be slightly higher than that for the more recent, internet-age documents, which measured at 12.3 per cent.

The paper's author, David Ison, said he hoped the results would help to debunk the "unjustified" myth that the internet is a major cause of academic dishonesty.

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