Mancheater: 245 bluffers caught in the last year

Almost 250 blaggers were disciplined for cheating and plagiarism last year. 

And it looks like some Manchester students are much more likely to cheat than others – 70 per cent of those disciplined were international students and 60 per cent were men.

A Tab Freedom of Information request reveals of the 245 students caught:

• People studying Humanities and Engineering  made up 78 per cent of cases

• More post grads were reported than under grads

• Three in five of those accused of cheating were guys

• 173 international students were reported as cheats

Spot the cheater

Those who were found to be plagiarising, colluding with each other and cheating in exams can have marks deducted or be completely expelled.

In the last year the university expelled a total of five men – four were international students.

However, not everyone faced the guilty verdict and 24 were either found not guilty or had their accusations withdrawn.

Just over 50 got off lightly with a warning and one lucky person received £750 compensation for a delay in the misconduct process.

However, not everyone felt the universities accusations of cheating were justified.

Emma, a second year studying Music, was accused of plagiarising her composition piece from a 70’s Swedish B-side she had never even heard of –  it wasn’t even on YouTube.

Her Swedish tutor claimed she had copied the chorus and attempted to dock 30 per cent off her mark. After a three month fight she managed to get it taken down to a five per cent deduction which she still found insulting.

She said: “Its music, cross over is going to happen. How many pop songs all sound the same?”

It wasn’t ABBA

Ben, a second year Geography student, helped out one of his friends with some graphs they had to produce on greenhouse gases.

He said: “We were all assigned the same data – our graphs were going to look the same. No wording of the assignment or layout showed any similarity.”

His tutor thought the graphs looked too similar and gave both of them a mark of zero for the entire unit.

Wikipedia was so much easier

However, Craig who was studying PPE, actually felt he benefited from being held back a year.

He copied parts of his politics essay from Wikipedia and was given the chance to redo the essay but failed to reference a quote correctly.

“In retrospect I think it was fair, I failed to comply with university rules. At the time I thought they were trying to make an example out of me but it did make me carefully reference in the future. In many other ways the experience helped me.”