Sixth-formers regularly cut and paste A-level coursework from the internet, according to a survey of teachers.

Nearly 60 per cent of teachers said that plagiarism was a problem in their schools. Of those, 28 per cent claimed that they suspected plagiarism in half or more of all work that they marked. They reported students being too lazy, or stupid, to disguise what they had done.

One teacher from Leeds said: “I had one piece of work so blatantly ‘cut and pasted’ that it still contained adverts from the web page.”

Another, from Southampton, said: “Two GCSE English retake students were very late handing in their last piece of coursework, an essay on Romeo and Juliet.

“When finally given in, the pieces turned out to be identical – and significantly better than either of them could have done. Not only that, the essays given in didn’t quite answer the title question I had set.”

Respondents told the Association of Teachers and Lecturers (ATL), which conducted the survey, that coursework should be scrapped for all A-level courses.

They said that plagiarism was difficult and time-consuming to spot, and that marking down pupils could put them at a disadvantage compared with the students of less rigorous teachers.

Mark Jones, from Wirral Metropolitan College, said: “With the best will in the world, you haven’t got enough hours in the day to search out where information was plagiarised from to prove it.”

Connie Robinson, from Stockton Riverside College, in Stockton-on-Tees, said: “With less able students it is easy to spot plagiarism as the writing style changes mid-assignment, but with more able students it is sometimes necessary for tutors to carry out internet research to identify the source of the plagiarism – this obviously adds to workloads.”

Mary Bousted, general secretary of the ATL, said the results of the survey highlighted the relentless pressure pupils were under from continuous tests and “getting high scores at any cost”.

She said: “In the long term, pupils are the real losers because they lack the skills they appear to have. Schools and colleges need to have robust policies to combat plagiarism, but they also need help from the exam boards and Government with resources and techniques for detecting cheating.”

A quarter of respondents said that their school or college did not have a policy on how to deal with plagiarism, and more than half said that their students did not sufficiently understand what it constituted.

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