Question to the Department for Education:

To ask the Secretary of State for Education, what steps his Department is taking to help tackle plagiarism among students at university.

The government has been clear that the Office for Students (OfS) should take firm and robust action to ensure that threats to academic integrity are tackled. We are determined to beat the cheats who threaten the integrity of our higher education (HE) system.

The OfS requires HE providers to design courses that enable the reliable assessment of a student’s genuine achievements. Students are nearly always obligated by their provider to sign a ‘student contract’ at the commencement of their studies. The contract sets out acceptable student behaviours. Many contracts contain a reference to plagiarism and academic fraud. Many also set out possible sanctions that students may face if they are found to have broken the contract.

As independent and autonomous bodies, HE providers have discretion when imposing sanctions, provided that those sanctions are authorised by the contract. The most recent guidance from the Quality Assurance Agency highlights the importance of severe sanctions of suspension or expulsion if ‘extremely serious academic misconduct’ has been discovered.

HE providers' approaches to tackling cheating include deduction of marks, no credit for the work in question, permanent exclusion for a second offence or immediate expulsion depending on seriousness.

In March, the government challenged PayPal to stop processing payments for ‘essay mills’. PayPal is now working with businesses associated with essay-writing services to ensure its platform is not used to facilitate deceptive and fraudulent practices in education.

Furthermore, our recently published Education Technology Strategy challenged technology companies to identify how anti-cheating software can tackle the growth of essay mills and stay one step ahead of the cheats. This publication can be found at: https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/realising-the-potential-of-technology-in-education.