How to Write Better Essays

because they’re convinced that these are the facts and their role is to

trade them for marks, if they’re to succeed.

Plagiarism

In fact plagiarism illustrates the point we’ve been making in this

chapter perfectly. As we’ve seen, one of the causes of it is this belief

that exams are passed as a result of giving right answers. But unfor-

tunately all too often the solution to plagiarism reflects the same

assumption, thereby compounding the original problem. We argue that

the only way to avoid plagiarism is to give a reference for every idea

quoted, paraphrased or borrowed in any way. In other words, students

come to realise that to get good marks they must continue to trade for

marks as many right answers as possible, only now in the form of

references.

Worse still, they are given the impression that there is nothing new

in education. It reduces academic work to the far less significant exer-

cise of just recycling received opinion. There is no room for original-

ity, or at least you are not required to produce it. All that’s asked is that

you show evidence of hard work by breaking up every paragraph with

five or six references to works from which you have derived your ideas.

The only challenge this presents for most students is how they can

throw as many references in as possible at minimum cost. Inevitably

they gather the impression that education is more concerned with what

they think than howthey think.

One mature student explains the problem in his student magazine,

In my opinion the most important purpose of higher education is to

teach the student how to think in a sophisticated manner. Sadly...

universities... cannot resist the temptation to teach the student what to

think as well – not the best way to produce enquiring and innovative

minds.

There seems to be a tradition... that an opinion is somehow more valid

if someone has said it before: I can see a justification for this, in that if

an opinion has been in the public domain it has been subject to public

scrutiny, but I suspect that the motivation has more to do with the ‘hero-

innovator ’ notion: if the person who has said it is important enough it

must be right.

When I write essays I am required not only to give facts and ideas, but

to quote exactly where I found them: if I simply thought of them myself

68 Interpretation of the Question

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