Plagiarism, Plagiarism, Plagiarism

Oh dear. Apparently, lots of shameless students, even the hallowed ones who enter the ruling class by going to Oxford and Cambridge, are copying their essays from the Internet. Gadzooks! Next, you'll be telling me that people are having sex out of wedlock and that Tony Blair tells lies!

This deplorable state of affairs shouldn't be allowed to continue!

But of course, no one even bothers to address the simple question; why is this happening? Because that would throw up just too many worms from the can of offal that is the current British State Higher Education system.

So it's left to us on AngloAustria to consider this modern phenomenon. However, it isn't really that modern, is it? If final degree ratings fifty years ago had also been heavily based on the sacred socialist educational cause of continuous assessment, you can bet your bottom sovereign that every student worth their salt then, would have been copying essays from clever former undergraduates on the same course, for a small fee; in fact a thriving market would quickly have established itself where impecunious doctorate students helped out undergraduate charges perhaps in return for the odd pot of beer or the odd snaffle of chips, to eke out meagre scholarship allowances.

The problem is one of continuous assessment, rather than one of plagiarism, but nobody will even think about mentioning this because life is rather easy at a modern British University, for everyone involved, with continuous assessment in place. When I was a boy, most of us realised that we had to write our own essays, and research them ourselves in the library stacks, and ask impertinent questions of lecturers, because this was the best way of understanding and memorizing the requisite information, in order to get through the final exams with a good mark. With 100% of those marks coming directly from the dreaded finals, those few fools who did plagiarize, so as to be able to spend more time down the bar or in bed with floozies, would get their drunken and debauched comeuppance with a poor degree award on results day. But with so much of the final degree mark these days being staked upon the democratic God of continuous assessment, it absolutely makes sense for bright young students to plagiarize their essays from the Internet, because if they actually wrote their own essays instead, their final pieces of, ahem...'work', would look less good than those who had successfully plagiarized.

One is reminded directly of the same situation occuring with central bank monetary growth. You may be an Austrian entrepreneur who knows an engineered boom is going to eventually collapse in a malinvestment bust, but if you don't join the ride, you're going to lose out to all those schlepps who do believe that the age of financial losses is over; the trick of being a successful Austrian investor is one of knowing when to pull out just before the inevitable crash.

Getting back to education, if a student is honest and does their own essays, in toto, continuous assessment has created the perverse position of singling them out for worse marks.

So there we have it. If you want to succeed on an essay-based British State Higher Education degree course, it has now become essential to plagiarize. Well done, all you socialists who brought this unintended consequence about, through your hatred of the unfairness of finals exams and the unfairness of some doing better because they work harder than the rest or the unfairness of some possessing better memories.

Life is unfair. I do wish you would get used to it.

Instead of having a higher education system where people learn how to think independently, and retain information, we have created a system where to succeed you must lie and cheat your way through to success; and afterwards it is not so much a case of forgetting what you learned but a case of never having learned it in the first place. Alas, this is a good lesson to learn in New Labour's Cool Britannia, because to succeed in all aspects of politics you must learn to lie and cheat successfully and you must also learn to make the facts meet the required actions rather than learn to make the required actions meet the facts. So all in all this horrendous use of plagiarism in British Universities is a splendid Triumph for the political classes. Well done.

But what a situation to have brought about in the first place, to have turned dreaming spires into dreams about Britney Spears. And what a gigantic waste of taxpayers money sending all these people on three year drinking, drugs, and sex holidays, to learn how to lie, cheat, steal, and bend all real world facts to the perverse distortions of political reality, whatever the hell that is; I suppose whatever Tony Blair says it is to get a good newspaper headline the next day.

So what's the AngloAustrian postion on education, I hear you ask? It's the same as with money. If you want a decent improving economy you need a hard money standard, away from government control, preferably based upon 100% gold or silver specie bank notes. If you want a decent improving education system you need a hard exam standard, away from government control, preferably based upon a 100% grading from finals exams results.

The entire education system should be taken out of government hands, immediately.