The win-at-any-cost ethos that has recently felled leading sports figures caught cheating in rugby, Formula One and football is also evident among a small percentage of students.

In British universities, across all faculties, there has been a growth in the detected cases of plagiarism in the past decade. Most students — more than 99 per cent — are honest and honourable but the remainder yields a sizeable number caught cheating.

In the UK there are more than 80,000 law students, of whom 300 a year are caught cheating. The penalties range from a formal warning to expulsion. For law students an adverse finding can have grave consequences because legal bodies do not admit anyone with a record of dishonesty.

The word plagiarism comes from the Latin plagiarius — someone who abducts a child, a kidnapper. Today, a plagiarist can be seen as having snatched the work to which someone else has, in effect, given birth. Students commit plagiarism if they put into their work the academic ideas of someone else without acknowledgment — commonly by copying from another student, downloading material from the internet or paying for an essay to be written by an essay-writing firm. Law schools issue clear advice about how to avoid unacceptable practices. Students should study that advice carefully because it is not all intuitive. Lending your work to someone who then copies it, for example, is commonly classified as a distinct offence alongside that committed by the copier.

Universities use sophisticated electronic systems to detect plagiarism. Law schools pass all essays through systems that identify any parts copied from a web source and any parts copied from the work of another student submitted that year or in previous years. Even Ucas uses software to detect plagiarism. In a survey of 50,000 applications in 2007, many for medical science courses and for Oxford and Cambridge, significant plagiarism was detected. Curiously, 234 applicants for medicine all began their personal statement with an identical anecdote about setting fire to their pyjamas at the age of 8. Tutors are also alert to the possibility of plagiarism where work submitted is of a standard at variance with the known capabilities of the student.

There are many websites that offer bespoke answers to essays. An undergraduate answer might cost £120 but the price leaps to £600 if the customer wants it written and delivered within three hours. These companies are widely regarded as making money from cheats. The companies coyly try to exculpate themselves by saying that they sell these essays only to “assist learning” and they always warn students they must not be used to cheat. But then they give the game away by such website puffs as “guaranteed 2.1 standard or your money back”. How would a student determine the standard of what he or she had purchased unless it was submitted to be marked as his or her own work?

In general, cheats do not prosper. Doing the research and critical thinking required for essays is a useful and reliable way to prepare for exams and as all law schools require students to take conventional exams as well as course work, essay cheats sometimes fall at the exam hurdle before their other fraud is discovered. Oscar Wilde noted that “success is a science; if you have the conditions, you get the results”. In law, dedicated study is the key condition to success; it cannot be substituted but the fruit of scholarship is bountiful.

The author is Professor of Law and director of the Centre for Law at the Open University

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