Hey, did you see that show on TV last night about people downloading music from the Internet? No, I was busy with my research into students cheating at university. What do you mean by cheating? Plagiarism. What's that? Basically, it's when you use someone else's ideas or work and pretend it's your own work. There's nothing wrong with using other people's ideas or research, but you have to say where you got the ideas or information. Uh-huh. There was a famous case last year of a university Dean who had to resign when it came out that in a few books he'd written over 20 years ago there were some instances of plagiarism. Oh yeah, I remember hearing about that. I thought they were being a bit tough on him. I mean, it was a long time ago. Well, it's a pretty serious thing to do in academic circles. It's intellectual theft. It's nothing new, but it seems to have become much more common recently. How can you tell? Oh, a few surveys have been done on it. One survey in the US found that back in 1969, 58% of school students let others copy their work, but this had risen to 97% in 1989.