A TEACHERS’ guide to coursework cheating was issued by the Government’s examinations watchdog yesterday.

The Qualifications and Curriculum Authority (QCA) gave warning that teachers would be guilty of professional misconduct if they let students pass off plagiarised material as their own in coursework for GCSE and A-level examinations.

The QCA set up a task force last year to develop guidelines for teachers after an inquiry into coursework in more than a dozen subjects found evidence of widespread cheating. Ruth Kelly, the Education Secretary, responded by ordering a fundamental review of the role of coursework, which accounts for between 20 and 60 per cent of available marks.

The QCA’s Authenticating Coursework guide reminds teachers that students must sign a declaration to confirm that the work is their own. It advises them to make a series of checks to confirm this.

They include: minimising the chances of collusion or copying by ensuring that part of a coursework task is carried out under supervision; checking whether the use of specialised terms and phrasing is typical of a candidate’s work; and checking whether the standard of essays and other coursework is similar to that achieved by students on supervised tasks.

The guide tells teachers to check that the font size and margins are consistent on word-processed work. Differences in size, or in spelling and sentence structure, could indicate that students had cut and pasted material from other sources. Where they doubt the authenticity of coursework, teachers are advised to question students about the subject matter to establish whether they understand it. The guide also urges teachers to study websites that offer essay-writing services for sale to ensure that they are more able to identify plagiarised work. Unusual phrases in students’ essays should be run through internet search engines to establish whether they have been lifted.

The QCA urges teachers to report incidents to examining boards when they become convinced that students have presented plagiarised material as coursework. “When submitting work to the moderator you must sign to say that you are confident that the work is the candidate’s own,” the guide says. “You will be aware that the submission of work that you are not confident is the candidate’s own could be considered professional misconduct.”

The QCA’s review of coursework in subjects including English, history and mathematics found plagiarism via the internet, collusion and “coursework cloning”, where teachers gave students too much help.

MARKING TIME

The QCA’s guide on cheating in coursework advises teachers to

• Consider ways to personalise the task for individual candidates to prevent collusion
• Provide students with examples of good and bad referencing of material in coursework, including of websites
• Encourage students to value the process of completing coursework, and not simply the work
• Highlight the deficiencies of online essay banks
• Collect electronic information about essay-writing websites

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