White Paper January 2025
Ways in which Students Plagiarise
How students plagiarise, and why most of it comes from other students.
This is relevant to you because:
- You want to know which forms of plagiarism your assessors actually encounter most often.
- You're deciding whether your detection source pool needs to include previous student submissions and archives.
- You find paraphrasing a grey area and want guidance your markers can actually apply.
- You run group assessment and want to understand how collusion cases tend to arise.
Abstract
Based on qualitative interviews with Danish higher education institutions in autumn 2024, this paper examines how students plagiarise and where the material comes from. It distinguishes direct copying, paraphrasing without sufficient engagement, and translingual plagiarism through translation.
Direct copying was the most common strategy reported, with paraphrasing second and widely described as a grey area that consumes assessor time. The dominant source was not the open internet but previous assignments from other students, followed by self-plagiarism and collusion. Institutions with more group work reported more collusion. Translingual plagiarism was rare and largely undetectable with the tools in use, caught only when an assessor recognised the original source.