Is plagiarism in GCSE English lit exam possible?

I can see the signature is asked for but "own work" implies that you have written it - if you saying you can't reproduce another view I just wonder where the line is drawn

It's now standard on all papers

@Evvyjb
is this for English only? what about other subjects where opinions are asked for ie History, RE, Sociology and Economics?

You do... please see the signature line...

This is on ALL answer booklets now. It is also an explicit part of examiner training. If you think something is not the student's own work, escalated as suspected malpractice.

As has already been said, when "helpful" people online decide to create one size fits all answers and encourage students to learn them verbatim it creates problems.

They literally do declare it is their own work. The statement is printed on the front of the question paper which the student signs.

An invigilator cannot monitor that they are not repeating a learned paragraph that they did not originate - how could they?

@Evvyjb
I find it hard to believe that this would be highlighted as malpractice in an exam - coursework is different where people sign to confirm its their own work, in an exam student do not sign to say its their own work as their are invigilators to monitor that it is.

I am saying that it would - it absolutely WOULD be escalated as malpractice. If you are reproducing someone else's work and claiming it as your own it is plagiarism.

When candidates sign the paper there is a disclaimer that now says "I declare this is my own work". Why would they put that there?

It has been pulled up before (see pre-prepared stories created by YouTubers for Language exams) and will continue to be.

In an exam it would not be viewed a plagiarism as it is not copied in the same way - you can't expect any individual under exam conditions to take time to redraft etc Under exam conditions students whatever their age answer a question - if they have memorised paragraphs or essays and that fits then they write it.

Better the teacher raising the issue than the exam board!

Well, in which case I suggest you email the teacher back and asked for a copy of the paper first, and ask her to highlight all the plagiarism and specify how many words were plagiarised .

whether these were just a number of different quotes from a number of different websites, or one site.

Cause I'm really sorry but it's quite a serious allegation she's making. and I'd be actually well narked.

because I'm not entirely sure that she's got that much grounds here ! the teacher that is!

But you'll soon find out!

You can put quite a lot of text in Quizlet. She could have copy and pasted sentences/paragraphs from revision sites into cards.
There is huge volumes of material on some of these sites for a subject like English Lit - arguably more than in revision books, so the fact she doesn't like books is irrelevant.

Ah quizlet. Another source of reproducible responses.

That's super interesting about tiktok

Ok lacking in originality

which is precisely the point. It is not her own words or her own thinking. She is using someone else's work and passing it off as her own.

Recall of facts comes through quotations in Literature. You can't learn someone else's analysis and repeat it word for word, that is plagiarism.

Can you give more detail? Because this sounds odd. Does she have a photographic memory? I've been looking at lots of Macbeth, Inspector calls and Jekyll and Hyde, for ds2, and know a few key phrases. But how many words exactly did she plagiarise?

The teacher is incorrect - this is not plagiarism, they have memorised to reproduce in an exam. Ok lacking in originality but exams are a test of recall.

I'm a marker for GCSE Lit and I couldn't possibly know what is from a revision book every time. However, I suspect it's either incongruous with your daughter's ability, or she's a bright and able student who is learning things by rote and self-penalising because she isn't adapting to the question. Good lesson to learn though.

However, there's a massive issue with tik tok revision - the most popular GCSE Lit text featured 'obscure quotations' which soon became ubiquitous and therefore fail to impress (after you've marked 1,500 you can tell who has revised on tik tok!)

Having seen English Lit papers, I am surprised any student could remember enough material from a revision site to write a word-for-word account of it. The questions require long answers and generally the students write a lot (I was present in an exam this year). The content required for the answers is spoon fed to the students anyway, it's not as though their answers are going to be highly original.

It’s not automatically plagiarism if students repeat memorised phrases. In science the short mark questions are likely to be definition and simple recall - by their nature these will be the same as many online sources. It isn’t plagiarism if a child repeats what they’ve learnt from eg the course text book. A whole paragraph would be different, but this would be a strange thing to be able to do in an English exam.

And yet there are many people on you tube presenting one size fits all answers as the way to go.
Spoiler alert: it's a bad idea.

You can't drill out verbatim answers from online, hoping it hits the mark scheme. 99% of the time it won't and it's bad practice anyway.

It's possible that the test used a previous exam (or sample) question that has a model answer available - and she learnt that.

This is odd. Most English questions can't be revised for like that, from my understanding.

Did she just reel off lots of learnt sentences from online, that weren't relevant to the question? That's what it sounds like.

if that's the case, then she needs to approach the whole thing differently.

You can't spout learnt stuff. You need to think about the question and answer is very specifically as to the requirements of what is asked.

You can't drill out verbatim answers from online, hoping it hits the mark scheme. 99% of the time it won't and it's bad practice anyway.

It's definitely plagiarism, although I'm not familiar with GCSE rules to know if it would be ruled as such. She's presenting someone else's work as her own.

Also to those doubting, I definitely would've been able to learn that much off at that age. These days I barely know my children's names.