英国：学生网络抄袭现象严重

英国一项调查发现，超过一半的教师认为目前学生从网络上抄袭文章的问题很严重。据老师们介绍，一些学生原封不动地拷贝网上内容，甚至连粘贴到文章中的广告都懒得删。

Cheating seems no stranger to today’s students worldwide, who are becoming more involved in cheating with the help of high technology.

China is drafting* a law to combat* rampant* exam cheating with tough penalties and, in the United Kingdom, a recent survey showed that more than half the teachers in the country thought plagiarism* from the Internet had become a serious problem.

Some students who stole essays wholesale* from the Internet were so lazy they didn’t even bother to take the advertisements off the cut-and-pasted text.

Of the teachers interviewed in the Association of Teachers and Lecturers (ATL) questionnaire*, 58 percent had come across plagiarism among their pupils.

Gill Bullen from Itchen College in Southampton said pieces handed in by two students were identical* and “significantly better than either of them could have done.”

“Not only that, the essays given in didn’t quite answer the title question I had set.”

A teacher from Leeds said: “I had one piece of work so blatantly* ‘cut and pasted’ that it still contained advertisements from the Web page.”

Connie Robinson from Stockton Riverside College, Stockton, said: “With less able students it is easy to spot plagiarism as the writing style changes mid-assignment, but with more able students it is sometimes necessary for tutors to carry out Internet research to identify the source of the plagiarism.”

Mary Bousted, general secretary of the ATL, said: “Teachers are struggling under a mountain of cut-and-pasting to spot whether work was the student’s own or plagiarism.”

She called for robust* policies to combat plagiarism and asked for help from exam boards and the government in providing resources and techniques to detect cheats.

But there was another side.

“I have found once students clearly understand what plagiarism is, its consequences and how to reference correctly so they can draw on published works, plagiarism becomes less of a problem,” said Diana Baker from Emmanuel College, Durham.

“I think the majority of students who engage in plagiarism do it more out of ignorance than the desire to cheat. They really want to succeed.”

(SD-Agencies)

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draft v. 起草
combat v. 对付
rampant adj. 猖獗的
plagiarism n. 剽窃
wholesale adj. 大规模的
questionnaire n. 问卷
identical adj. 相同的
blatantly adv. 嚣张地
robust adj. 积极的