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A professor in political economy at the world’s oldest university has more or less invited his students to copy. It is his way of speaking out against the impunity of certain of his colleagues accused of plagiarism. He announced “I will not be checking to see if you have copied your work as I cannot, in good conscience, ask you to respect rules that the University of Bologna allows it’s professors to violate.”

A sign of the times, cheating comes down to glancing at your smartphone during an exam, or copy-pasting whole sections of texts found on the Internet. Attempts to cheat on final exams increased by 10% in 2014, when compared to 2013, according to National Education Ministry statistics.

Plagiarism is increasing at the secondary school level, according to the numbers revealed by the Inter-academic Commission of Ile-de-France. Between 2013 and 2014, the number of cases of plagiarism and copying reported to the disciplinary commissions in Ile-de-France doubled, increasing from 24 to 47. They represented last year 25% of the 188 cases of fraud on exams reported to disciplinary commissions.

The executive Director of the School of Journalism, Sciences Po, is accused of copying/pasting extracts of articles in her chronicles on the Huffington Post, without quoting her sources. The Director of the School of journalism wrote to both students and staff stating that: "the school, that teaches deontology, cannot take lightly such affairs".

The parliament's representative of French citizens living in Northern Europe, pleads for a systematic use of anti-plagiarism software. "It is a question of equal chances", insists the Deputy when addressing the Ministers of National and Higher Education on this subject.