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Meanwhile the director of admissions for the University of Cambridge has admitted that no attention is paid to the personal statements of applicants wishing to pursue their studies there. "With the profusion of companies and websites offering to help draft applicants' personal statements for a fee, no admissions tutor believes them to be the sole work of the applicant any more."

In 2007, a survey at Oxford University revealed a large number of prospective students were guilty of lifting chunks of their applications from internet websites that provide help in doing so. What was shocking was that so many were stupid enough to lift examples featured on websites without changing them to suit their own circumstances. For instance, 234 applicants for medical school told the identical anecdote of how they first became interested in medicine.

How can young people aspiring to join a top university be so dim and so devious as to try to pass off what essentially is someone else's application as their own?

I do not know what happened to the dishonest students applying to Cambridge and Oxford. To my mind, such fraudsters are not worthy of being accepted. Even if you overlook their motive - gaining entry to education by false pretences - surely they should be disqualified on the grounds of their stupidity in thinking they could get away with copying whole sections from sites to which thousands of other students also had access. Yet, according to the latest report of the office of the independent adjudicator for higher education, published this week, there has been a significant rise in the number of students challenging allegations of plagiarism, which has been attributed partly to a "moral panic" among the university authorities.

I cannot see how copying things from the internet and passing them off as your own can be seen other than seriously. Virtually everywhere in the world plagiarism by students at schools and universities is on the increase, whether in writing an application form or in filling essays or theses with information directly lifted from Wikipedia or Google.

Some miscreants are caught out by their tutors or by technological methods of spotting their deception. But it is clear that very large numbers are getting away with their cheating or, when discovered, are dealt with leniently. On finishing their studies they will be let loose with a degree, diploma or qualification which is false, because it suggests that the work done by the student has been his or her own.

The fault lies with the internet. Yes, cheating has always been around in schools and universities, but never before on such an industrial and technological scale. The easy access provided by the internet is a direct threat to individual and original thinking, writing and scholarship.

• I have been in France for a few days, during (but not at) the Cannes film festival, and noticed that there has been quite a lot said about the relationship between literature and film. The usual question was posed: why do so many superb novels turn into such poor films? I have long sought to discover the holy grail of a novel and a film version that could be considered equally brilliant. more...