The Benchmark Plagiarism Tariff: Operational Review and Potential Developments

There is significant evidence of variation in the penalties awarded in cases of plagiarism across the higher education sector, which has led to calls for standardisation of treatment. In this context, the annual reports of the Office of the Independent Adjudicator for Higher Education (OIA) in the UK have identified increases in the numbers of complaints pertaining to judgements of academic misconduct (OIA 2009). In 2010 Tennant & Rowell developed the Benchmark Plagiarism Tariff in an attempt at standardisation, whilst offering institutions a tool against which they could benchmark their policy and practice. Operation of this Tariff involves allocation of scores to specific aspects of each case such as the extent of the plagiarism, the academic level of the student and any previous history. The resultant total score is matched against a sliding scale of penalties, based on those in use at institutions. Following interest in the Tariff at the previous International Plagiarism Conference in 2010 an initial review of the operation of the tariff was proposed with a group of self-selecting institutions. The findings are discussed here, as a set of 155 cases from 9 HEIs were compared retrospectively in terms of the penalties prescribed by the Tariff and the actual penalties that were awarded. This exercise showed that in about half of the cases, the penalties awarded and the Tariff matched exactly. Areas of mismatch were commonly related to the severity of the penalty, reflecting variations in institutional practice, and the options permitted for resubmission. Also, some common infringements such as collusion are not addressed by the Tariff. As it stands, the Tariff clearly offers a useful initial benchmark for developing more consistent approaches to dealing with plagiarism cases.