British education is experiencing an epidemic of trickery and cheating, ranging from primary school teachers rigging key assessments through to 40,000 university undergraduates disciplined for plagiarism over the past four years.
An investigation by Channel 4 Dispatches, to be screened on Monday night, describes how shady practices and in some cases outright fraud are woven into the fabric of UK education as the use of exam results, league tables and performance indicators increases the pressure on students, teachers and institutions to succeed.
A series of freedom of information requests by the Channel 4 researchers found that in the past four years more than 58,000 undergraduates have been investigated by their universities for plagiarism. Of the 40,000 who were disciplined, 400 were expelled or excluded from higher education, while 12,000 had marks deducted, affecting their final degree classification in many cases.
Universities are now able to detect plagiarism more easily through the use of powerful software tools such as Turnitin, which inspects individual pieces of work for potential plagiarism by comparing them with an online database of academic material.
But a more recent development has been the rise of internet-based essay-writing companies that can produce bespoke work for students, making such cheating hard to detect as plagiarism.
The Dispatches team approached five similar services and recorded cases where the “client” was assured they could pass essays off as their own work or were advised to rewrite the material.
In one instance, a company offered to produce a 4,000-word dissertation in the space of a week for £480, and told a researcher “of course” they could hand it in as their own work.
Another service told an undercover researcher: “We can’t be seen to be telling you that you can hand it in because obviously that’s not allowed … I will let you take from that what you will.”
Thomas Lancaster, a senior lecturer at Birmingham City University and one of the country’s leading experts on student plagiarism, said that cases of “contract cheating” were on the increase in British higher education.
“The vast majority of students of course are completely honest but I’ve seen estimates of £200m a year going through these sites,” Lancaster said.
“I think there’s a lot of cheating out there. What we detect is only the tip of the iceberg.”
The programme found advertisements for “academic support, assignments, essays, dissertations, plagiarism-free” in phone boxes located outside a major university in London.
Further down the educational ladder, the programme exposed instances of secondary schools exploiting loopholes in regulations to avoid some pupils sitting examinations, so that their results would not show up in the school’s crucial performance tables.
Some schools – such as Portslade academy in Brighton – were found to be using so-called “guest students” as a way of moving special needs or struggling pupils off their rolls – allowing a child to sit GCSE exams but not be officially recorded as a pupil at the time.
Portslade later said the students had been “wrongly moved” to guest status and that it had held an investigation.
The programme highlighted several cases in which teachers had changed pupil assessments or coursework to artificially boost a school’s performance, in some cases under direct orders from the school’s leadership.
One teacher told the programme: “There was one girl, her coursework had no punctuation in it at all. In the end, I just had to go through it myself and put in the full stops and commas and the capital letters because she just couldn’t get it … We made sure that every student had coursework that was C and above.”
In one secondary school judged outstanding by Ofsted, a teacher reported that pupils were ordered to copy coursework directly out of a textbook by one of the most senior members of staff.
“The heads of departments feel under huge pressure and teachers at the bottom end of the whole hierarchy feel that they have to perform, they have to do it,” Birendra Singh, a former Ofsted inspector, told the programme.
“It amounts to direct pressure on teachers to cheat and teachers find themselves in a very difficult situation. Some leave voluntarily. Some are actually pushed out.”
Case study: pupil wrongly reclassified as a ‘guest student’
One example of the pressures on schools to improve their exam performances may be seen in the case of Vicky Cobb, a pupil at Portslade community academy in Brighton.
Vicky’s mother told Channel 4’s Dispatches that her daughter was asked to attend a special unit after being diagnosed with mental health issues.
But when it came time for Vicky to return to Portslade in 2013, the school approached her mother.
“A couple of months before she took her exams, I was called in to a meeting and asked to sign a letter. Basically, it said that it wasn’t in Vicky’s best interests to continue going into school but she could still come back for her exams,” Claire Cobb said.
“They just gave Vicky a whole pile of stuff to take home with her to revise for her exams and that was it. We were give no reasoning at all and we were like, hang on, why now?”
The school had reclassified Vicky and 11 other pupils as “guest students” – a classification usually applied to external candidates who merely use a school as an exam venue.
“When she came back to do her exams, that was when they classed her as a guest student, because she was no longer on the school books,” Claire Cobb said.
According to Dispatches, reclassifying the 12 pupils saw Portslade’s benchmark GCSE results rise from below the national average to just above it.
In a statement, Portslade said: “We can confirm that Victoria was one of 12 students who were wrongly moved on to guest status in 2012-3. This should not have happened.
“As soon as the governing body was informed about an issue relating to the registration status of a small number of students at the school, an investigation was initiated.”
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