In ye olden days of the paper and pen, catching pupils who were cheating at school was no doubt much easier for teachers, writes Jessica Aldred. They could probably tell if your mum or dad had done your homework for you (maths, in my case, always), whether a set of essays had exactly the same spelling mistakes, or spot who you liked to sit next to in exams.
Today more and more students have access to the internet, which yields a whole host of sites willing to offer essays or exam answers for download. Teachers and exam boards are thus faced with having to identify new and wider cases of plagiarism and cheating.
Today's guidelines released by the Qualifications and Curriculum Authority (QCA), the government's exam regulator, represent another step in the fight against online plagiarism.
The guidelines, called Authenticating Coursework: a teacher's guide, are published in the form of a leaflet (pdf), which gives advice on how to check that the work is the pupil's own independent work, what to do if someone has cheated and useful sources of information and help.
Teachers are asked to consider whether they have minimised the chance of an exam candidate colluding or copying, whether the coursework is of the standard expected of that pupil, whether spelling and structure are consistent and whether it matches the rest of their coursework.
The leaflet advises teachers to become familiar with the websites that offer essay-writing services, which will help them better identify cases where work has been downloaded.
If a pupil is suspected of cheating, a teacher can ask them to complete a further exercise, or produce the sources of their work.
But how can one teacher keep up with hundreds of thousands of websites? Type "essay writing" into Google and it generates 2,290,000 entries offering custom essay writing services for prices starting from £9.95.
Scanning may be one of the answers, with one exam board launching a pilot project to scan pupils' GCSE and A-level coursework.
It may begin at home too, with the QCA examining the role of parents helping their children with coursework, and calling for a much clearer line between supervising work and doing it for them.
The leaflet gives a comprehensive list of websites for teachers including the Plagiarism Advisory Servioce , which offers advice and guidance.
The scale of cheating and plagiarism in the secondary school system is so large that last November the QCA set up a coursework taskforce, following a review of coursework at GSCE level. The review warned of a "new generation of risks of plagiarism" which came with access to the internet and the cut and paste tools. It said that exam boards were failing to spot cheating, even though the number of cases of fraud was increasing.
In 2004, 3,600 teenagers were caught breaching the rules - a 9% rise on the previous year.
The problem can only be expected to get worse with the growing use of the internet, with nine out of 10 teenagers interviewed by the QCA saying they had access to the web at home.
But, in the end - even if they do get away with it - as my teachers used to say: "they're only cheating themselves".
