Writing about plagiarism, Ian Jack cites the view of Jude Carroll...
that Britain should see it as a pedagogic rather than a moral problem, reflecting how students were taught and examined.
On the contrary. Whatever other kind of problem plagiarism is, it is at least a moral problem; or it is a moral problem as well. It may be that there are students (or others) who aren't fully clear on the difference between doing their own work and plagiarism, but if so, it should be a matter of only a tutorial session or two to clarify the distinction for them. Plagiarism is a form of deliberate dishonesty. It is cheating. If you say that plagiarism is a pedagogic rather than a moral problem, you lose the core reason why anyone should think to refrain from it. Pedagogy can be more and less effective: someone might have failed to see the point; they might have a different pedagogical idea from yours. A student once gave me as his reason for copying his entire essay word for word from a chapter of a book about Hobbes that he'd decided he couldn't improve on it. Yeah, right. Nought per cent.