What is your responsibility?
As a teacher, you must make sure that the work submitted for examination or moderation is the candidate’s own work. Candidates must understand that they cannot submit someone else’s work as their own, or use material produced by someone else without citing and referencing it properly. A candidate taking someone else’s work or ideas and passing them off as his or her own is an example of plagiarism.
It is your responsibility as a teacher to prevent plagiarism from happening and to detect it if it does happen. We need to be confident that the work we assess is the candidate's own before we can award a grade. You are responsible for the supervision of candidates when they are completing coursework and you are responsible for authenticating the candidates' work before you submit their marks for external moderation.
If you discover plagiarism in a candidate's work during the course, you may resolve the matter internally.
If you discover plagiarism in a candidate's work at the point of submission to us, you must not submit it. You should contact us if you are unsure whether to submit work or not.
How should candidates reference their sources?
Whether the information is in the form of a diagram, an image, a quotation or a passage, if it has come from another source this must be cited at the point it appears in the candidate’s work, and included in the bibliography or list of references section at the end of that work.
Candidates must clearly show:
- exactly where and how someone else’s work has been used within their own submission
- whose work it is, and the source it came from.
When candidates use the work of others, they must ensure that they are not trying to present this work as though it is their own. In this guide we explain how sources should be referenced in candidates’ work.
You should encourage candidates to record details of each source they consult as they prepare their coursework. They should use either ‘single’ or “double” quotation marks accurately and consistently around the text quoted when recording material taken from sources. This will allow them to use these quotations accurately within their own work.
What are acceptable and unacceptable approaches to referencing?
Please read the acceptable and unacceptable approaches to referencing (PDF, 103KB) guide.
What referencing system should be used?
Please check the syllabus document as we do sometimes specify a preferred system. If one is not specified in the syllabus, you may select the system to use. Whichever system you teach your candidates to use, it must be clear and consistent within the work and should include, at a minimum:
- the author(s), photographer or artist
- the title
- the date and place of publication (where stated)
- (for electronic resources) the URL and the date it was accessed, as the content may change over time.
When students are using videos from the internet, the following information should be included in the reference:
- the name of person posting video
- the title of film or programme
- the year video was posted
- the URL for the location of the video and the date it was accessed, as the content may change over time.
References for personal communications via conversation, phone, Skype, FaceTime, email, text message, letter or fax should include the following information:
- the sender/speaker/author
- the year of communication
- the medium of communication
- the receiver of communication
- the day/month of communication.
When a student is referencing leaflets or business cards, it may not be possible to include all of the information below, but the student should include as much information as possible. It may also be useful to include a copy of a leaflet in an appendix to the student’s work:
- the author (individual or corporate)
- the date (if available)
- the title (in italics)
- the date obtained.
Will the use of sources improve a candidate’s work?
Many types of coursework and creative work can and should use the work of others to influence their work, illustrate points, provide a contrast or explore ideas in further detail. The use of others’ work is also an important part of research and it is legitimate, provided that the source is appropriately cited and referenced so that the reader can see what it was and where it came from.
Different syllabuses and components will have different requirements for the content of the work, as they are assessing different things; however, if a candidate simply quotes others’ material at length without commentary or discussion, they are unlikely to achieve high marks. This is because it is not their own work, nor are they using it to explore their ideas.
How to identify plagiarism in a candidate’s work
As well as including others’ work without properly citing it, candidates may also commit deliberate misconduct by buying the work of others, usually online. Such attempts are often detected by antiplagiarism software after the work is submitted to us, but teachers also have a responsibility to verify that each submission is the work of the candidate. You can detect misconduct of this type by comparing the material presented for submission to work that is verifiably the candidate’s own (e.g. work produced in class).
Look out for obvious deviations in fluency or style from the candidate’s other work, and for substantial amounts of work produced which you have not seen in previous lessons. You may find that typing some of the suspected text into a search engine within “speech marks” helps to identify whether it comes from an existing website or not.
Some candidates attempting to pass off others’ work as their own use so-called ‘article spinners’. These are web-based tools that disguise copied material by replacing key words with their synonyms, producing material that is structurally identical to the original but features subtly different vocabulary. As demonstrated in the example below, the prose generated by ‘spinning’ can seem superficially impressive at a glance, but clearly lacks coherence when read attentively.
An example of text produced using a ‘spinning’ tool is provided below.