The Spanking Writers

“Last week a survey of 1,022 undergraduates at 119 institutions indicated that cheating has become widespread in British Universities. In a poll carried out by the Times Higher Education Supplement, one in six undergraduates admitted copying from friends’ work”. So wrote Frank Furedi in the Guardian yesterday.

Apparently “students caught cheating are far more likely to feel a sense of irritation at being caught out than to feel a sense of shame, humiliation or remorse”.

You can imagine where this took me on a flight of fancy over the breakfast table: would our local University appreciate my help to ensure that future punishments are more apposite?

I’d expect suitable recompense, of course: it would be demanding work. I don’t know how many university students we have locally, but let’s guess 10,000. Fifty per cent female (others could deal with the boys!)? Let’s assume they’d only cheat once in a four-year University career (and believe me, if I were dealing with them, they *would* only cheat once). Thirty weeks in an academic year?

That’s one young lady a day needing to be disciplined, making well over a thousand strokes per year to be administered (at the usual tariff of six per time, which some readers may deem lenient for an offence of this magnitude). You can just imagine the risk of repetitive strain injury.