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