Brandon Robshaw: 'Many students simply don't know how to reference'

The season of mists, mellow fruitfulness and plagiarism is upon us once again. All over the country, lecturers in higher education must brace themselves for an influx of students whose idea of writing a really good essay is to find one and copy it.

Much has been said and written about the growing problem of plagiarism, but most of it comes from the wrong angle. Whenever academics come together to discuss the matter, it is with the attitude of "search and destroy": the concern is merely to detect and punish offenders. It's all stick, no carrot. But the question of why so many students feel the need to plagiarise in the first place is seldom addressed.

There are two types of academic plagiarism. One is where the student has pulled – and possibly paid for – an entire essay off the internet, complete with references and bibliography, and submitted it as their own work. This is deliberate, cold-blooded plagiarism and deserves to be punished. Students who go in for it probably feel out of their depth and should not be doing a degree anyway. For this type of plagiarism the remedy already exists: most universities now deploy software that can detect material taken from the internet.

More widespread, however, and more insidious, is accidental or semi-accidental plagiarism. A student finds a useful article, and incorporates a chunk of it into their essay. They try to make it their own by the use of paraphrase, usually of a fairly minimal kind: changing "however" to "but", "increase" to "grow", "perhaps" to "maybe" and so on. It's not difficult to spot the join – in that part of the essay the sentence structure suddenly becomes far more complex and assured, the spelling is spot-on, and the vocabulary undergoes a miraculous improvement.

A simple, if rather cruel way of exposing this sort of thing is to ask the student for the meaning of, for example, "peritext" or "palimpsest" or some other uncharacteristically erudite word they have deployed. Naturally, they flounder. Nobody warned them they were supposed to understand all the vocabulary in their essay.

But outright dishonesty is not intended. Sometimes, indeed, students who have followed this path rather sportingly list the several sources they've plundered in a bibliography, though there are no references in the essay to indicate which bit comes from where.

Why do they do it? Many simply do not know how to reference. They need to be shown examples of the Harvard system (or whatever system their university uses) in action. But the "how" is less important than the "why". Students will have heard plenty of dire warnings about the penalties for plagiarism. They know all about the stick. The trouble is that no one has told them about the carrot: essays that bristle with references get higher grades.

And where would they have learnt this? Not in school, where referencing is seldom taught. Homework essays that rely on unreferenced internet sources get big ticks and "Well Dones". No one has ever told them that study at undergraduate level is basically a matter of demonstrating that you've read and understood the relevant literature.

They are afraid that if they own up to their whole essay being composed of sources by experts in the field, they'll convict themselves of unoriginality – not realising that originality is not required at undergraduate level. What is required is a mastery of sources by experts in the field. Thus we have the tragi-comic situation where, instead of showing off the research they have done, they are actually concealing it.

What students need to be taught (and if they could be taught it at school, so much the better) is not just that plagiarism is bad and will be punished but that referencing is good and will be rewarded. Once they've learnt that, of course, they still have the hard work before them of learning how to comment on, compare and evaluate the sources they use. That's a new skill and it takes time to acquire. But we should set them on the right road by emphasising the simple message: "You've done a lot of reading. Make sure you get the credit for it."

The writer is an associate lecturer at the Open University