A recent survey has suggested that even highly intelligent students admitted in the prestigious Cambridge are prone to copy and submit essays they find on Google.

An anonymous online poll conducted by the student newspaper Varsity participated by more than 1,000 students, and the results showed that 49% of undergraduates, at some point of their university career, submit someone else's report as their own. Out of this only 5% admitted that they had been caught while doing this.

"Sometimes, when I am really fed up, I Google the essay title, copy and throw everything on to a blank word document and jiggle the order a bit. They usually end up being the best essays," reported one student.  

The surveys also showed that the most number of students indulging in copying were from Law, with 62% of them admitting it.

More than 82% of undergraduate students admitted that instead of consulting books in the university's copyright library, they went for Wikipedia, the open source encyclopedia instead.

Robert Foley, a professor in biological anthropology at King's College Cambridge, said, "It is a depressing set of statistics. Plagiarism is a serious and potentially disciplinary offence which can lead to failure to obtain or withdrawal of a degree. The university is planning to introduce detection software to crack down on the problem."