By Mat Johnstone, News Editor
Almost fifty thousand students have been caught cheating at university in the last three years.
Uncovered by an investigation in The Times, these levels of cheating were blamed on an increase in students from outside the UK.
According to Freedom of Information requests submitted by The Times, international students were four times more likely to cheat on exams and coursework.
More than a thousand cases of cheating or plagiarism in the last three academic years were reported by 11 universities. Of these, the worst was the University of Kent which saw 1,947 cases of students cheating on coursework.
The scale of cheating and plagiarism at university is thought to be far worse than the figures show, as much of the academic misconduct will go unreported.
Essay-writing websites are now widely available, and can pass through detection systems like Turnitin for a fee.
Less than 1% of those found guilty of some form of academic misconduct were actually expelled from university.
Only five cases of impersonation were reported, where students had another person attempt to sit an exam instead of them.
The University of Strathclyde was not included in the data uncovered by the Times.
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