You may have heard about the plagiarism scandal that hit Bhisho recently, where a provincial government’s strategy document was found to have been cut-and-pasted from an Irish strategy paper.  

It is appalling that this kind of thing is happening in government. It means not only was the strategy author lazy, but there was no strategy to begin with; the document was just smoke and mirrors to serve other unknown purposes.

This kind of unethical behaviour is why I sit and work through every student’s essay that I receive to check for plagiarism.

I do not want our students to believe that cutting-and-pasting is something you can get away with or that it will be tolerated.

Even though there is now plagiarism detection software, the software can be fooled and students do so on a regular basis. It takes experience from having read many student essays over many years to be able to spot the kind of copying that anti-plagiarism software regularly misses.

The main reason I spend time on every student essay to detect plagiarism is because, at the learning level, it is important to know if students can or cannot write.

If they plagiarise you want to know why and if something can be done about helping them to figure out the demands of the academic writing style.

Another reason I spend time looking for plagiarism is that one wants to be fair to, and reward students, who are putting in effort into their studies. It helps you to identify students with graduate potential early on so that you can encourage them.

Before the age of ‘Google’, plagiarism was confined to maybe no more than about 10% of students.

However, because the internet has become like a vast ocean of free information in which students just swim, they can find what they want and then with a simple click, paste, they can submit work for assessments.

It seems to me that plagiarism has exploded because of the virtual working environment that  the Covid-19 pandemic has put us into.

The level of student plagiarism detected not just by myself, but many other colleagues, has demonstrated that we must restrain our expectations that virtual learning can deliver quality education.

Half of the problem is the logistics of online learning for large university classes. Teaching and marking virtually is incredibly onerous for those who want to still give their students some level of attention.

When we meet on campuses, one simply tells students to  meet you at the office and you can have ongoing, face-to-face conversations to look over their work and chat with them about their interests.

Such student engagement online is almost impossible for undergraduates.

Imagine the task of marking 400 essays online. Doing this has been among of the most excruciatingly painful work I have ever had to undertake in my academic career!

Marking essays and written assignments online requires physical labour at the computer and makes it very difficult to give good feedback.

This is why at some point I gave up on doing it on the screen and elected to print out every single assignment once I had the opportunity to do so at the office.

The feat of printing out hundreds of documents submitted on e-mail and online platforms would have been impossible without the help of the departmental administration.

Once printed, of course, they have to be stapled. These micro-tasks may seem unimportant, but not if you do them hundreds of times over while conducting other course-related administration.

The result is that marking took longer, because I insisted on checking every single one for plagiarism as I would normally do. Those who had committed the most egregious plagiarism were e-mailed so I could find out the reasons.  

While I was busy managing all this chaotic virtual learning, a certain  SA vice-chancellor was waxing lyrical on Twitter about the virtues of online learning and the marvellous progress of his university in getting students online.

Pah! I felt like throwing a stapler at something when I read those tweets.

I challenge that VC to just take one 400-strong undergraduate class online. I can bet he will not even last 30 minutes through the “Please mute!”, “Switch off your video!”, never mind the deluge of plagiarism he would have to assess thereafter!