Georgetown : Aimed at reducing the incidence of plagiarism among candidates of the Caribbean Secondary Education Certificate (CSEC) Examination, the Caribbean Examination Council (CXC) is hoping to introduce software programmes in the near future to help assess works submitted to be examined. This is according to Senior Assistant Registrar, Administration and Security, attached to CXC, Ms Susan Giles. She was at the time making her contribution to a CXC programme which was aired on the National Communication Network. The programme was designed by the examining body to sensitise candidates of what is expected of them. According to Giles “it is not going to happen now but in a couple of years we are going to be asking for assignments to be brought in online and to have them pass through certain software (programmes) to be tested.”
However since the programme is not set to commence just yet, Giles said that CXC will continue to rely solely on its examiners to determine if there is evidence of plagiarism. “They have seen it all and the chances are that you would suffer the penalty if you (candidates) plagiarise work.”
According to CXC’s Assistant Registrar in the Examination Development and Production Division, Mr Stephenson Grayson, plagiarism is usually detected when dealing with School Based Assessments (SBAs). Most SBAs, he said, comprise of projects that must reach to CXC by a pre-determined date. He explained that these assignments are assessed through a moderation process which is conducted by moderators who according to him are aware of all the different writings on whatever topics candidates would have chosen. These moderators, he noted, are in fact experts in the field. “It is not unusual for one of the moderators to read in your report something he or she had read sometime before. The point is we are not telling you not to use work from someone else but the fact is you need to acknowledge wherever you get the information. You cannot pass off that information as your own… that is what the plagiarism issue is about. You cannot pass off that information as your own when it belongs to someone else. You need to know that if it is not acknowledged it becomes an issue and you will be disqualified,” Grayson asserted.
However, Giles revealed that it has been discovered that plagiarism is not limited to SBAs since there have been incidents where candidates, who possess photographic memories, would reproduce stories they have read for the English A Paper Two. She noted that in 98 per cent of the cases the examiners also know the stories thus candidates are going to pay a heavy penalty for reproducing the work. “Another thing we have is that we have booklets out there which have some very good short stories that we have gotten over the years and we have that in circulation…you have to remember that if you have seen the book, if you know the story the examiner knows the story too. So what we are saying to you is to be a bit creative, write your own stuff, do your own work and don’t you worry about what you saw or what you remember; write according to what the examiners have called for.”
She revealed that in the case where candidates are found plagiarising a short story they will be given no marks for that specific question even if they acknowledge it is not their own work. In the case of the SBAs candidates marks will be cancelled. “I really wish to discourage candidates from plagiarism because there has been a case where it was the moderator’s own work that the candidate used. This was really quite heartbreaking for us because we expect that when we get work from candidates it is original…”
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