It would be funny were it not so sad. Officers at Ucas, the university admissions service, were grimly ploughing through personal statements from students last year (this is the only part of the paper admissions process that applicants can stamp with their own DNA) and found that they did not appear to be choosing between thousands of variegated, textured, enthusiastic young people. They were choosing between clones.

In a survey of 50,000 applications, many for Oxford and Cambridge to study medical science, 234 applications confided an anecdote that started, “Ever since I accidentally burnt holes in my pyjamas after experimenting with a chemistry set on my eighth birthday I have always had a passion for science.”

Many also kicked off, “Living with my 100-year-old grandfather has allowed me to appreciate the frailties of the human body.” Touching to read once, maybe, but after encountering this humane observation 175 times in a single entry round, one can dimly see that the admissions tutors might have smelt a rat.

Let’s leave aside the fact that asking a 17-year-old who enjoys pulling, shopping, sleeping and MSN Messenger — and who is only applying to uni because all his mates are — to craft a faithful and accurate personal statement is about as daft as asking, say, a tobacco company for an honest corporate mission statement. That’s by the by. I know where the rat is and so do we all. It’s online.

I’ll let you into a secret. The reason why I and many other journalists can write a piece on almost any mainstream subject and endow our articles with a veneer of authority in the time it takes to roast a chicken is the internet.

I can see what others have written, I can download quotes, Google the subject, sift through newspaper websites and copy stuff.

But none of this means that I know anything. It just means that I am persuasive enough in my presentation to make the seamless leap from total ignorance to apparent expertise with some pencil-chewing and a few clicks of the mouse.

The universities know this, too, just as they know that the problem of plagiarism (although I call it “research” when I do it) is endemic, impossible to prevent and making things worse for everyone. “Today’s students have a different notion of using evidence because of the way they use the internet,” says Steve Smith, vice-chancellor of Exeter University.

Before they all had laptops equipped with broadband and search engines, students had to use other tools when it came to finding and digesting information that they would have to reproduce later under exam conditions. Those tools were called books, but most students these days don’t have much time for them. Too old-fashioned. Too much effort. Too much pressure.

The internet has, let’s face it, put the paper-printed word almost out of business when it comes to education. It is the first and only port of call for many students.

Cue violins and so on, but in the old days I do remember that homework meant using dictionaries, reading textbooks, and drawing crabs and oxbow lakes and King John at Runnymede by hand with coloured pencils and making things out of egg boxes.

Now primary school children go to online calculators to do their sums, and if they are asked to write or illustrate a piece of work (they are never asked to learn by heart or by rote), they can download it in seconds from myriad educational websites, and cut and paste the illustrations from online image banks.

The use of recycled and copied material for coursework in GCSEs and A-levels — also available for a fee online — is now so widespread that examiners have complained it’s impossible to tell candidates’ work apart, and the government had to hold a summit.

At university, a hundred years ago, when I was set an essay — apart from one undistinguished episode that I will come to shortly — I would rush to the library and swottily remove from the shelves all the books the tutor had asterisked on the suggested reading list before anyone else could get their hands on them. I would then go away, read the relevant bits and beaver away in longhand for hours to produce my five sides of A4, which I would read out in full while my tutor struggled to remain conscious.

Now, of course, students can download entire essays from the internet, use online encyclopedias that aren’t even written by academics (Wikipedia) or, with a quick e-mail, commission graduates to compose the essays for them. So it’s not surprising, when faced with an online application form in which they are supposed to express their innermost core and reveal what makes them so different from the other 50,000 applicants wanting to study medicine, that hundreds of students simply download someone else’s thoughts.

Sad on so many levels. Students can cut and paste, but they can’t write or structure an argument. The download industry encourages cheating and plagiarism — even if the service providers say otherwise — but demeans genuine learning and achievement. It taints and diminishes everyone. The only winner when it comes to cheating is the £200m-a-year online essay industry where rates start at £120 for 1,000 words. (Which means that it’s more lucrative for graduates to ghost student essays than it is to contribute original, bylined work to several national newspapers.)

Let me conclude with a confession, just to show how pointless and shaming and undistinguished it all is. It is one that I have made before — in case anyone felt tempted to accuse me of self-plagiarism — but here goes, anyway.

When I was at university my Greek literature tutor set me an essay on Solon, the distinguished pederast, lyric poet and lawmaker (he introduced trial by jury in 6th-century Athens). My heart naturally sank. So I turned to the sheaf of essays I had been lent by a classics scholar at Balliol who knew his onions and lo, I found one on the exact same subject.

When it came to my tutorial I simply read out verbatim his entire essay. I couldn’t understand much of it, let alone decipher his handwriting, but otherwise I felt the tutorial was going like a train. At the end I sank back expectant and awaiting plaudits.

“Not your best effort, Rachel,” my tutor said, giving me a hard stare.

Well, at least I knew I’d cheated and so did my tutor. But apparently the few students who are officially accused of plagiarism (it is a difficult charge to prove) are affronted. They whinge about tuition fees and being busy and stressed or whatever. But above all, they don’t think they’ve done anything wrong. Some have even threatened to sue.

So to rephrase the question: if those who apply to higher education all have the same grades, present the same statements, do all their research online without using textbooks, hand in essays they have paid others to write for them or downloaded from the internet and think that’s what studying for a degree is all about, what on earth is university for?

I don’t know, but you’re bound to find an answer if you Google it.

rachel.johnson@sunday-times.co.uk

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