Academics must have known they had a real problem on their hands when Google stopped being a word for computer geeks and became a recognised verb, writes Alexandra Smith
Google was once a handy way to get the answers to life's more inconsequential questions. An online trivia provider. But that was long ago and the search engine is now single-handedly helping students stumble through university.
If the age-old problem of plagiarism was not already bad enough, Google and other information sites like Wikipedia, have turned it into an out-of-control plague threatening to damage the reputation of academia.
Sally Brown, from Leeds Metropolitan University, is presenting a paper at this week's international plagiarism conference in Gateshead. She has dubbed students of today "the Google generation" and "Wikipediasts".
Prof Brown is quick to point out that not all students are thieves who deliberately steal other people's ideas in an effort to boost their marks. Rather, a crisis in confidence often lands students in the murky world of internet plagiarism.
She has heard all the excuses: "I'm not really good enough to be here"; "they will find me out soon enough"; "I just couldn't say it better myself."
Intentional or not, plagiarism cannot be tolerated in universities, yet it is emerging as such as a serious problem that even Oxford was forced to recently admit that it is rife at the institution.
At the heart of the problem is students' naivety. They believe that unlike copying from a published text available in the library, lifting material from any number of sources on the internet will go undetected. And sometimes it does.
But with the development of online plagiarism detectors, using the internet as "inspiration" or to meet the word length of an essay is risky business.
Google and Wikipedia have now made it simple for students to cut and paste slabs of text and pass it off as their own work. Universities are fighting back, but can even the most sophisticated technology keep up?
