Coursework Cheats

There is another interesting story in today's education guardian:-

Exam regulator publishes report to stop coursework cheats
Rebecca Smithers
Friday March 3, 2006

Teachers are strongly urged to ensure that their pupils' coursework is genuinely their own, as part of a fresh crackdown on cheating in the run-up to this year's exam season.
New guidance from the government's exam regulator, the Qualifications and Curriculum Authority, offers strategies to prevent groups of students from colluding, and tips to help teachers identify changes in spelling and structure that may suggest parts of the work have been copied from elsewhere.
Teaching staff are also advised to familiarise themselves with websites that offer writing services, which will help them to better identify plagiarised work downloaded from the internet. The coursework leaflet, published today, was produced by the QCA coursework taskforce, chaired by headteacher Sue Kirkham, who is currently president of the Association of School and College Leaders (ASCL).

This is a subject close to my heart, having just spent a large part of the last week supervising my 16-year-old daughter complete three pieces of Coursework.
I know from experience how tempting it is to just step in, and correct mistakes, alter grammar, and re-order the text to make more sense. The hard part is defining the border between help and actually adding my own material. I do make a conscious effort to coach, rather than edit, and to suggest, rather than do. I feel that the finished article is significantly better than she would have produced, unsupervised, but is that in itself going to far?

I am also aware that some parents overstep this mark, and some even practically complete the coursework for their children. I feel that this is wrong, and it must give those children an unfair advantage over those whose parents don't, or even cannot, help.

How on earth a teacher is supposed to police this, is another major issue. Simple blocks of text 'cut and pasted' from computerised sources may be easy to spot, but material from sources offering writing services may not be so easy to identify. The fact that the government's exam regulator, the Qualifications and Curriculum Authority, is getting involved in the issue suggests that they are well aware of these problems.

Perhaps the only answer is to limit coursework to completion in school, in a controlled classroom environment. However, this does seem a bit heavy-handed, and raises the issue of exactly when this could be done.

At the end of the article, the Guardian lists the following links: -

Read a copy of Authenticating Coursework: a teacher's guide here.

It is also available on the QCA website.