Is plagiarism in GCSE English lit exam possible?

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My dc is in yr10. Their English teacher has said they have to grade them U in their end of year test because some of their work is word for word from popular revision sites. And that she needs to ensure it's in her own words as otherwise it is plagiarism. Can it be plagiarism if it's in an exam and she's just memorised some information? It's not like it is coursework and she's copied it.

So she memorised facts from a revision site word for word?
I wouldn’t have thought it was plagiarism if it was written from memory in a test except perhaps for a creative story in English Language.
I would ask for it to be re-marked.

Plagiarism is attributing another person's work as your own.
So reproducing word for word from a revision text is most definitely plagiarism.

By simply memorising revision notes, your DC is also only demonstrating that they have the ability to memorise, and not any of the skills actually required by the test.

Be thankful that this is only Year 10 school exams and your DD now knows not to do it for her GSCEs.

I disagree. From a quick look at the major exam boards and the JCQ regulations plagiarism regulations/guidelines only seem to apply to coursework/NEAs.

JCQ says "By virtue of its definition, plagiarism is restricted to those examination components where students undertake examination work in unsupervised conditions, such as coursework, pre-release work, or the compilation of research notes which can be used in the examination. It can also occur when candidates are permitted to annotate texts and bring these into the examination room. "

AT GCSE level, especially lower ability students everything will pretty much be rote learning. Answers will be reproduced from classwork.

Yep. That's plagiarism. The revision sites/books should be used to prompt students own thoughts, and not just be regurgitated by memory, especially word for word. It's an important lesson.

Thanks for the replies. I appreciate it's not ideal, but still seems odd to consider it plagiarism when you haven't copied it. But yes, of course if the exam boards would mark it this, much better to find out now. I just wanted to double check if it's true.

Exam boards would flag this as potential malpractice, particularly if it's noticeably different to the rest of the writing/come up over again.

Additionally, the front page of exam booklets now includes the line "I declare that this is all my own work"

Of course it's plagiarism if she doesn't reference it. The exam wants her words while she references the text. This would have been spelt out by her teachers for the past few years.

I would look at it as it's impossible for the teacher to give a fair estimated grade. Because she was lucky in that a question she had memorised had come up on a revision site, but that won't necessarily happen for the real thing. so she hasn't shown the teacher she knows how to look at a question and figure out the answer.
There's also the potential question on whether she knew those questions would come up. Does the school always use the same year (eg 2 years previously) papers so she could work out and just memorise that?

If she just took more general answers and worked them into the questions, then suggest next time she takes the answers she wants to regurgitate and rewrites them so it is in her own words. She can then memorise those.

Even if not plagiarism by the technical JCQ definition, as an English teacher and marker myself I can guarantee that someone who has written something word for word from a revision guide for their English exam will not be doing well.

I suspect the English teacher is trying to teach them a lesson here.

I'm struggling to understand this, how on earth did she learn so much rote that it became plagiarism?

It's malpractice.

To perfectly replicate a revision resource word for word, I'd be very suspicious that a student had actually brought something into the exam hall or stashed notes in the toilet cistern. Plagiarism would be an attempt at diplomacy.

For me, that is definitely plagerism. She has to show original thought/opinion.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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!)

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.

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?

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.

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.

She hasn't memorised past papers as far as I know - she usually revises by watching videos & using Quizlet. She wrote out some quotes as I was testing her on those, but she didn't appear to be memorising paragraphs - she has got a good memory for certain things so it seems more inadvertent but I only have an email from the teacher with very little information about the specifics. She hates revising from books, so I can't see how she would have reproduced anything significant. She wasn't practising writing out paragraphs or answers.