STUDENTS scribbling answers on their hands and sneaking phones into exams were among hundreds of cheats caught by the region’s universities within a year.
The rumbled attempts are among the catalogue of cheating obtained in an exclusive Daily Post investigation.
And we can reveal the cases of coursework plagiarism, collusion and exam hall misdemeanours is on the rise, with combined offences at Liverpool’s three universities and Edge Hill, in Ormskirk, shooting up from 619 to 759 within a year.
Today, city students said a “desperate will to succeed” and pressure to land employment in tough economic times was partly behind the willingness for people to bend the rules.
But universities’ use of sophisticated software to snare cheats is also cited as a factor in the growing number of reported cases.
One of the main forms of rule breaking is plagiarism – which includes a student failing to acknowledge sources or deliberately passing off the work of somebody else as their own.
In the case of two repeat offenders at Hope University during 2008/9, it was enough to see them thrown off their course.
Another student at the University of Liverpool had their studies terminated for “fabricating research data”.