Cheating in a mock gcse exam

[fadingg]

Could I please ask, what the normal process would be when a child is accused of cheating in an internal mock exam? Should we be informed, should she have any right to appeal or state her case?

My daughter has been accused of cheating. Her predicted grade for this time next year is a 6 in this subject (other subjects 8s), but she had worked hard to improve and managed an 8 on her mock paper.

The teacher has stated (in front of the class and written on her paper) that she cheated by memorising the model answer paper, whilst acknowledging that she had no prior knowledge of which past paper would be chosen, didn't copy from another child and didn't have the model paper in the exam. Simply that her wording is too close to the model answers so must have been memorised.

My daughter now has to attend a 1:1 session to explain her answers on the paper and prove her knowledge verbally. There may be consequences if she cannot. As you can imagine she is somewhat embarrassed and demoralised.

Is this the usual way of dealing with cheating? And frankly, is this even cheating?

@Teachermaths

Perhaps "lazy" was harsh and borne of annoyance with this particular teacher! I do see that using past papers may feel more comfortable and accurate for the teacher trying to predict grades.

However, if those papers are freely available to revising students, that accuracy benefit seems to me cancelled out by the fact diligent students are likely to have seen all the questions before.

Perhaps this is more the case in an essay subject than a maths or science one since students are unlikely to memorise numerical answers.

However, surely it's also easier to come up with original mock questions for maths and science papers than essay subjects since there are standard methods and right or wrong answers (and less of the caprice of an exam board that has decided to weight essay answers in favour of historical context or some such!)?

I agree about showing workings, though. I was terrible for that as a pupil, not out of arrogance but because I was just keen to get to the answer and if it was "obvious", I just wrote it down! Genuinely took me a while to grasp the point and necessity of writing down "2+2=4" rather than just "4".

OP, bear with your dc on this and tell her to slow down her thinking and treat the examiner like an idiot!

Making the questions is easy. Working out the grade boundaries is nigh on impossible with such a small sample size. This applies to any subject.
Our problem is we do 2 sets of mocks and usually one set has already been released by the exam board. Most students don't find them independently to revise from so we get one or 2 out of 240 each year that do. Not worth writing our own papers for that.

I used to write model answers and memorise them for exams. Would never had occurred to me that would be cheating. I learned very effectively that way too.

This is what I would do too! Particularly in subjects I sometimes struggled with. Surely the whole point of learning is to learn the correct facts to answer a question.

I feel really sorry for your DD as clearly she has done lots of revision to memorise answers to lots of different questions

It sounds like your daughter has cheated. It's very easy to work out which paper the mock paper will be (99% of the time always the most recent paper) and it's easy to memorize the answers for it. It won't really help her in the long run but I understand why she did. The teacher will be able to tell as she has done so well and probably wrote answers near identical to the solution available online.

Given they can use calculators for science papers, I'm not surprised an able mathematician could do the maths needed without writing down interim steps.
But surely this is so easy for the school to check? Just ask the DC to do the calculation again with different numbers, and check they can use the right method.

Many posters are being awfully naive... OP I would speak to your daughter again and say you won't be angry you just want the truth, before you contact the school as it would be so much worse if it transpired she had been lying later on.

If this was a paper that the teacher / department had produced de novo, replication of model answers a pretty certain giveaway of cheating.

Somehow gaining access (superior hacking skills? Bribing member of teaching profession with access to relevant board's papers and low ethical standards?) to a locked paper you discover is going to be used, cheating.

Having already seen a paper and any associated mark schemes etc that have been in the public domain for about a year and which one could legitimately have been using as a revision aid for all that time, not cheating.

@MarchingFrogs has it, I think.

Final update: having failed to speak to the biology teacher seven days on, I've spoken to the head of science today. She has retrieved the paper and can see no evidence of cheating (and trust me, I'm as surprised as you because I'm not completely naive, and had fully expected to be kicking dd's butt this weekend).

Strangely, there is no mathematical answer that has no working (despite the teacher stating this was the problem), and no five mark maths question at all. It's a bit bizarre.

The school have said they will sort out the problem. Teacher has apologised. Daughter happy to have her name cleared and her grade restored.

I'm scratching my head. Not sure what's happened?!

Well done for pushing on and finding out the truth.

Somethings missing though if the teacher has specifically said about the maths answer and then there is no evidence. I would be making sure the school know you have concerns about that.

Glad its sorted for your DD though and hopefully this doesn't affect her in future exams.