When the issue of students obtaining unfair academic advantage is discussed, the focus is, virtually always on text based material concerning inadequate attribution or more blatant, but possibly inadvertent, passing off. A 2008 conference concerning plagiarism held had only two, from over thirty, sessions, keynotes and workshops, focused specifically on issues of plagiarism from within the creative, visual, art and design disciplines. The purpose of this paper is to outline many of the issues of misrepresentation with particular reference to vocational education in creative disciplines and to propose a route that may be followed to clarify matters for specific subject grouping and institutions. It is asserted that this approach, if formalised, can, lead to the establishment of agreed verifiable standards and thus improve the quality of the student work created (Porter 2009).
This paper does not focus upon text based misconduct but upon issues of academic misconduct specifically associated with images, ideas and intellectual property within the creative disciplines of art and design
