wurk»education {Your career. Your say.}

Well fancy that! The day after I posted Computers in Education (1) and mentioned how some students of mine some time ago handed in assignments in which pages and pages and pages were taken directly from the net, AQA (the UK Assessment and Qualification Alliance) detected “blatant copying from the internet” in some of the 2005 English coursework assignments for GCSE.

There are it seems so many sites out there publishing coursework essays (sometimes free, sometimes for a fee) that numbers of students are simply downloading other peoples stuff and submitting it as their own. What’s more, some students aren’t even changing the work that they download and so when examiners come to assess such work they find that many students (from different areas of the country as well as those from the same school) present work that is simply not theirs.

Some students in fact don’t even disguise the work that they submit - they don’t change the words, they don’t change the paragraphs, the font or even the layout – they simply hand it in and assume that no one will notice!

GCSE coursework however is generally internally marked before being submitted to an external moderator for checking and validation. AQA says “The style of some written pieces was so different from the rest of the candidates’ work they (the moderators) wondered how teachers had failed to challenge it, especially as they knew the candidates much better than the moderator” – and therein lies at least one of the problems!

Are teachers checking candidates work sufficiently well? Are they under so much pressure to produce results that will show them and their institution in a good light that they are casting a blind eye to this plagiarism?

In a very, very few cases they are, but in the vast majority they are not. What they are actually doing is using a technique called “scaffolding” in which students are given quite a detailed outline of what their coursework should contain. In many cases such “scaffolding” is so detailed that a paragraph by paragraph outline is given and often the opening sentences of such paragraphs are given too.

AQA are quoted as saying: “Often moderators would find several paragraphs beginning with exactly the same sentences, and paragraphs would be arranged in identical order…… In the most severe cases, moderators found themselves having to make judgements about whether there was so much scaffolding and so little of the candidate’s work that it was a kind of mass plagiarism.”

Another examination board Edxcel is quoted as saying in their 2005 exam report that: “… teacher guidance to candidates stretches what is acceptable to the limit (and beyond) by providing over detailed essay plans, which specify what should go in each paragraph, including the points to be made and the quotations to be used.”

Clearly there are lessons to be learned by some teachers and by students too to prevent that evocative word “cheating” being used indiscriminately by sections of the mass media.