by David Craig
Finally, the ‘degree factory’ university is increasingly corporate and litigious in its dealings with students. Expensive graduation ceremonies, the use of bailiffs to recover student debt and threats to prevent graduation over unpaid library fines all underline the changing nature of this relationship. Universities have been quick to complain about the rise of the “student as consumer”, but they have rarely stopped to reflect on their own role in this transformation.
Curriculum shrinkage
We are living in the information age. Our knowledge about the world is expanding faster than at any point in history. It is, therefore, ironic that many UK degrees are experiencing curriculum shrinkage. In other words, the total amount of subject material that they cover is diminishing.
Post expansion, undergraduates often arrive knowing less than they would have historically as a result of reduced A–level syllabuses (see Chapter 12 Schools: Supplying Course Fee Fodder?). They then learn less during their studies and end up graduating knowing less about their subject than they would have 30 years ago. This might sound hard to believe, but consider this quotation from a Russell Group modern languages graduate, describing their undergraduate studies: “We were studying French literature but in English translation and then writing about it in English.”
All of these students will have studied French for at least seven years before university. But despite a course requirement of an A grade in A–level French, many students were unable to read literature in French and then write about it in French. It is notable that an elite university should accept students unable to study literature in the original language. It is even more remarkable that their language degrees should abandon the study of literature in the original language in order to accommodate these students.
This graduate’s frustration is symptomatic of a wider problem identified in a 2009 Higher Education Funding Council for England (HEFCE) report.144 This found that language courses in UK universities were being replaced by cultural studies courses, in which the literature and culture of a country are studied in English. Rather than addressing this problem of students arriving at university without sufficient language skills by actually teaching them, universities bypassed it by working in English. Universities might argue that the shift was ultimately driven by falling student demand for difficult, traditional language courses. Certainly, language courses have seen significant closures across the country, as the HEFCE noted:
“Between 2003 and 2008, the proportion of all students in the UK on languages degrees dropped from 3.3% to 2.9%. In England it was even more acute, dropping from 3.2% of the total to just 2.7%. The total number of full–time language students dropped 5% compared with an 11% increase in student numbers overall.”145
To attract students, who otherwise might not have applied, universities downgraded their language courses to cultural studies courses. This created two problems. Firstly, students who expected to benefit from serious linguistic training didn’t have the opportunity to do so. Secondly, language degrees were now misbranded meaning that employers, who expected a degree to equate to some fluency in that language, were likely to be disappointed. In the 1980s, a language degree would have been expected to ensure a reasonable level of fluency in verbal and written communication. This is no longer the case.
Curriculum shrinkage represents a reduction in the skills and knowledge provided by degrees compared with what has been taught in the past. It is driven by other Great Expansion symptoms. When contact hours are decreased, class sizes increased and the ability range of students widened, curriculum shrinkage is a natural and inevitable mechanism for preventing an unacceptable failure rate. It has been exacerbated by a similar process in the school exam syllabuses for GCSEs and A–levels, reduced to raise pass rates and provide greater numbers of undergraduates for university expansion.
This is not a new problem. In 2000, Dr Paul Taylor, writing for the Independent, claimed that many degrees contained around half the content that they had pre–expansion:
“With the introduction of a modular curriculum, programmes (were reduced) by combining two units into one or eliminating others altogether; within a few years, degrees were a fraction of their original breadth. In 1974, I started a degree, following eight subjects with 21 hours each week. Fifteen years later, I returned to the same university as a lecturer; the same degree course now consisted of four subjects taught in 10 hours. With increasing student numbers and no increase in teaching staff, vice–chancellors (had) two alternatives: a substantial increase in class sizes, or a reduction in curriculum. They chose the path of least resistance … an undergraduate degree in 2000 requires about half the study time of its 1970s predecessor.”
In 2002, the Guardian interviewed Dr James Anderson, a computer science academic at Reading University. He claimed that much of the undergraduate syllabus had disappeared during his ten years of teaching. He listed subjects that he no longer taught because the degree had shrunk. These included euler operators, morphing, fractals and radiosity:
“It’s my feeling that the curriculum has reduced by 50% during my time. People are still getting degrees but they are studying half of what they used to. That experience is widespread across many universities, but no one will admit it.”146
The head of Imperial College, Sir Richard Sykes, also noted in 2002 that most of his university’s undergraduate degrees now required a four–year course to enable students to cover material that had traditionally been covered in three years. He identified the source of this problem as curriculum shrinkage in GCSEs and A–levels: “ …because the standard of the A–level has fallen so much over 10 years that we have to bring them up to speed before they can get on with their courses.”147
Geoff Parks, the director of admissions at Cambridge, made a similar point about his university’s undergraduates in 2005, stating: “Cambridge had admitted 142 fewer undergraduates this year than last because of an increase in four–year degrees, which are now common in engineering and the sciences, the result of pupils knowing less than they used to.”148
Whilst other universities have experienced similar problems to those faced by Imperial and Cambridge, they have decided to retain three–year science degrees. The reasonable assumption is that their three–year degrees now cover less material than previously.
In 2009, curriculum shrinkage was highlighted in numerous submissions to the House of Commons Select Committee investigation into universities. One was made by a mature student undertaking a Masters in Biological Sciences, whose son was taking the same A–levels that he had a generation earlier. Echoing Sir Richard Sykes, he noted the impact that curriculum shrinkage at school was having on universities:
“Swathes of maths have now disappeared from the school curriculum … much of what I had learnt at school now had to be taught at university, inevitably pushing out other material that would otherwise have been taught. This is … why students will not be as advanced at the end of their degrees as they were a generation earlier. Examples… include vectors, matrices and set theory… which are now only covered in optional modules at school.”149
A lack of basic maths knowledge amongst school leavers is not just affecting the curricula of STEM subjects (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics) degrees. In 2012, a report from the Royal Society of Arts (RSA) warned that the numeracy problems of the UK’s school leavers were forcing other degrees to reduce their mathematical content:
“Universities are marginalising mathematical content in the delivery of degree courses because English students are not capable of studying it.... For instance, in the social sciences, quantitative research methods may be neglected....It also means English universities are not keeping pace with international standards.”150
In fact, problems with numeracy were so acute that the RSA report noted that some university degrees did not “...advertise the level of maths needed to comfortably study particular subjects for fear
of hindering applications.”151 As with language students, the ‘degree factory’ university’s approach is not to help these students by working with them to develop the necessary skills or knowledge. Instead, it is to pander to them by making degrees easier to pass and easier to teach. None of this actually helps the students in the long run.
At its worst, curriculum shrinkage sees the ‘degree factory’ university providing the bare minimum amount of subject knowledge that still qualifies as a degree. Many universities get away with this because they are increasingly teaching students wishing to graduate with the least possible effort. This creates a vicious and complicit cycle in which the real victims are students with ability and a desire to learn. Unfortunately, the ‘degree factory’ university not only helps students through its actions (curriculum shrinkage), it also assists them in what it ignores (plagiarism).
Plagiarism
“Over the past three years, more than 45,000 students at 80 institutions have been found guilty of ‘academic misconduct’ ranging from bringing crib–sheets or mobile phones into exams to paying private firms to write essays for them. Some 16,000 cases were recorded in the past year.” Independent on Sunday (2012)
Plagiarism is cheating. It occurs when a student hands in somebody else’s work as their own. It has always happened in universities and it always will happen. It is almost an expectation of academic life. It is also an expectation of academic life that, if detected, it will incur sanctions, with repeat or serious offences resulting in expulsion. The offence of plagiarism is at odds with academic cultural values. One core tenet that cuts across all subjects and all levels of study is that you give credit to ideas and thoughts of others by making reference to their work. To do otherwise, even unwittingly, is intellectual theft. If you want to understand how far attitudes towards cheating have changed during expansion then read the National Union of Students (NUS)’ submission to the Select Committee in 2009. This claimed that: “Punishments’ and ‘penalties’ are usually unhelpful in combating plagiarism and often take up significant amounts of valuable staff time. Institutions should instead focus their resources on deterrence through effective induction and training.”152
This apparently soft and less than judgmental attitude to plagiarism could be seen to trivialize not just plagiarism but the whole academic process and it devalues the efforts of students who don’t cheat. Every university and degree course provides copious guidance about plagiarism. If students don’t understand this, then they are likely to struggle with some of the more advanced concepts that a degree will (hopefully) introduce to them.
It is difficult to estimate accurately the overall extent of plagiarism in UK universities, but it is clearly a widespread problem. In 2008, the University of Cambridge’s student magazine Varsity reported on a survey in which nearly 50% of the university’s students admitted to plagiarism. The figure was even higher amongst law students, with 62% admitting to cheating. Of those who admitted cheating, 82% confessed that they had copied material directly from Wikipedia. Only 5% of those who cheated reported getting caught.153
The Times Higher Education Supplement conducted its own plagiarism research in 2006, talking to over 1,000 students in 119 universities. It found that 33% of students copied material directly from the internet or books and that a further 16% copied work directly from their friends. A further 10% of students went that extra mile and bought essays online.154 The research coincided with an admission from Oxford University’s chief of discipline, Alan Grafen, that plagiarism was becoming so widespread that it was threatening to undermine the quality of the university’s degrees. He had this to say in 2006:
“There seem to be two reasons for the prevalence of simple copying. It is indeed very easy with online sources. A less obvious reason is that at British schools nowadays, a practice is encouraged of submitting work in class that is more or less cobbled together from the internet. Hard though it may be to believe, students type word–for–word and increasingly copy and paste from the internet, and submit essays containing whole pages of this verbatim material.”155
When anti–plagiarism software was first introduced, the results were immediate. Coventry University found 237 students cheating, expelling 12. Nottingham University found 53 cases, but expelling just 1.156 Since this initial burst of enthusiasm, universities seem to have changed either the settings on their software or their approach to dealing with the volume of plagiarism that the software was discovering. In one piece of anecdotal evidence, an engineering graduate interviewed mentioned that: “I know one guy who has chosen every module because they are the same as a guy in the year above him and he has every piece of coursework from him and he’s copying it word for word.”
Anti–plagiarism software used correctly will alert academics to this type of cheating as it stores copies of previous years’ work, checking current submissions against these. The House of Commons Select Committee submissions from 2009 reveal academic after academic complaining about ever–escalating levels of plagiarism. What is also noticeable in these accounts is the extent to which unofficial university policy is criticised for complicity in ignoring plagiarism. This could take the form of discouraging academics from investigating suspicious work to lenient non–punishments for students found to have cheated. The same complaint is made again and again: that administrators in universities want neither bad publicity nor falling grades.
Equally alarming has been the rapid growth of essay–buying websites for plagiarists. These enable students to purchase specific essays written to order by subject, level and length and even grade. The website passes along the request to an academic who writes an essay. Then the website returns it to the student. These websites claim that they offer their services only as ‘specimen answers’. But it seems implausible that students would pay for something to read rather than to submit. The benefit of this approach for the student is that it won’t trigger plagiarism software as the essay will (hopefully) have been written from scratch rather than copied from the web. It also raises the grimly amusing possibility of academics moonlighting as essay–writers for their own courses, submitting essays to themselves for marking.
In 2006, the Guardian interviewed Barclay Littlewood, who ran one of these companies, ukessays.co.uk. In 2005, his company had a turnover of £1.6 million and he estimated the UK marketplace for online essays at £200 million (incidentally, a figure echoed in 2015, by Thomas Lancaster, one of the country’s leading experts on plagiarism).157 At the top end, Mr Littlewood mentioned one student who had spent £17,000 with his company. In the same article, the newspaper found that one online essay provider was able to supply a first class degree essay of 1,000 words, delivered the next day, at a cost of £320. They noted that: “Most bespoke essay–writing companies charge by the word, although some charge by the page. There is one company that bills students £30 per 250 words and another that charges at least £60 per essay.”158
There is anecdotal evidence that essay–writing services are often used by international students. One company estimated that 60% to 70% of its work came from international students. This usage may reflect the now significant range in academic and linguistic ability of international students arriving in the UK. It might also be a reflection of the increased stakes for their study, created by the much higher fees they are charged by UK universities. If a student is already spending over £100,000 for a degree in terms of tuition fees, living costs and travel, then a mere £17,000 might seem a reasonable surcharge for the right grade. It also seems reasonable to suggest that the 2012 tuition fees rises will have replicated these incentives for domestic students.
A quick Google search for “UK Online Essays” reveals over one hundred UK–based companies with professional websites offering to provide virtually any level of material, from essay to thesis, on any subject. Given Mr Littlewood’s estimate for the size of the online essay market, we can hypothesise at the scale of this problem in UK universit
ies. For the sake of simplicity, we will stick to undergraduate essays. If ukessays.co.uk’s turnover was £1.6 million a year and a 1,000–word essay cost £160, then that equates to sales of 10,000 undergraduate essays a year or 238 a week (if we look at the main academic year of 42 weeks). If the essay marketplace is worth £200 million, then this would be equivalent to around 1.25 million bought essays a year, against a current student population of 2.3 million.
The financial inequalities of the expanded UK academic system mean that even cheating isn’t a level playing field. If you can afford personalised essays written specifically for you, then there is little chance of the plagiarism being picked up by software. Academics might have their suspicions about how the barely articulate, unengaged student manages to produce a first class essay, but proving cheating requires significant amounts of time, effort and motivation on the academic’s part. All of this is difficult to manage within a system where scale prohibits personal interaction and the university wants all students to pass and their grades to improve every year. For the less well–off plagiarist, however, it’s a case of taking their chances with Google, Wikipedia and software detection. These students shouldn’t worry unduly though; research in 2005 found 51% of academics took no action at all if they suspected their students of plagiarism.159 It also showed great diversity in what academics actually considered to be cheating across different universities and subjects.
By 2017, a Times Higher Education Supplement survey of 1,000 academics found that 61% has discovered their students committing plagiarism at least once and that 26% suspected that their students committed plagiarism regularly. One social work academic who responded to the survey noted that: “…there are some cases where I think students have paid for essays or dissertations to be written... It is virtually impossible to prove these cases, even when a student, who usually gets poor marks, suddenly gets a 70 per cent – I think the university gets frightened of appeals, too.”160 Another academic provided the following context for how his university dealt with plagiarism: “I have seen a student found guilty of setting off a fire alarm by smoking in his dormitory receive a far harsher punishment than a student found guilty of the most arrant plagiarism.”161