Forget about cheating, what about learning?

This paper will argue that academics need to re-focus on what really matters when developing policies to prevent plagiarism (used here in a broad sense to include unauthorised collaboration in assessment) and deal with its occurrence. Too often, institutions adopt an approach based the concepts of dishonesty and theft. A focus on learning, I will argue, can be fairer to students, more effective in terms of plagiarism prevention, whilst resulting in a system with strengthened resilience to litigation. The topic of plagiarism and other academic offences in university assessment has been extensively studied in recent years. Published papers have revealed research findings on why students plagiarise (e.g. Saltmarsh 2004); how curricula and assessments can be structured in order to reduce opportunities for plagiarism (e.g. Carroll 2002); and institutional responses more broadly (e.g. Park 2004). But plagiarism is not a new problem. In a study of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries Simmons (1999) notes two broad discourses regarding authorship. Academic staff used the “individual author ” model, whilst students ’ model wa