Loose in the system

Plagiarism may be a thing of the past soon.

When news broke in May that ex-HSC students had employed their tutors to write their assignments for them, it wasn't long before elite schools were being cited in the media as potential suspects. Is this a genuine problem for hard working students, or are these reports mere media posturing over a one-off, unsubstantiated claim?

The initial claims were that Homebush tutor Rachel Gardener had helped as many as 2,000 students by completing their assignments and essays. However, these figures were later clarified as 2,000 students in the past 15 years. Which works out at around 130 students a year.

With over 66,000 students participating each year in the HSC, 130 students cheating seems miniscule. That is as long as the Board of Studies assertion that "we do not believe the malpractice is widespread" is correct. However, if one tutor is helping 130 students a year, the number of students being helped by tutors across the state must certainly rise exponentially.

It is estimated that there are over 500 individual tutoring organisations in NSW, at which spokesperson of the Australian Tutoring Association Mohan Dhall asserts "an estimated one in five school students (are) receiving some sort of academic tutoring". This makes the estimated figure of HSC cheats somewhat larger, if 132,000 students are being tutored, a proportion of which are receiving unfair advantages, there seems to be a problem with the way the Higher School Certificate is marked.

Steps have already been taken to prevent the spread of malpractice by tutors, with the Australian Tutoring Association etablished in March. The association aims for industry self-regulation and has a strict code of conduct that all tutors must abide by. However, registration is voluntary, which risks membership comprising only of tutoring organisations who can abide by the association's code of ethics, while the offending organisations will not be required to join.

So far there are only 85 members of the Australian Tutoring Association in New South Wales, which begs the question: how many of the unregistered tutoring organisations could not meet the requirements set forth by the association?

As PLC Croydon principal William McKeith asserts "Private tutoring organisations are cheating the system and damaging the reputations of other tutoring organisations that are doing the right thing and trying to bring some degree of self-regulation to the industry."

The problem of plagiarism does not stop with unscrupulous tutors though, as suggested by a local teacher who wishes to remain anonymous. "Too many students find it easy to cut and paste work off the internet, which is very poor plagiarism because the internet is not a good standard of work, it lacks depth of knowledge. It is easily recognisable as plagiarism."

Universities have taken steps to prevent this practice by requiring students to submit work by email so that it can be processed through a program called 'Turn It In' which filters the work to identify plagiarism. While schools have not adopted this measure, a positive result of avoiding plagiarised work has arisen.

"To combat cut and pasting, we now award more marks for students who have original ideas," explains the teacher. McKeith also believes that "educating our students and those who support them in the ethical issues surrounding intellectual property and the ownership of ideas and work is a priority of our schools."

Tutoring organisations may always be susceptible to malpractice. However, there are definite measures being taken by schools and the Australian Tutoring Organisation to reward students for genuine work. The simplest advice given by the unnamed teacher would be that students need to be "encouraged to have a love of learning, not base their school work on getting high marks and ranking the students against each other but encouraging them to work together."

With the rapid growth of technology and uncontrollable nature of tutor organisations, the Board Of Studies may find it increasingly difficult to prevent plagiarism. Progressive thinking from some schools is now changing the basic elements of learning and taking the emphasis away from results, which should reduce problems of cheating and fairness. If this approach to education becomes widely practiced, issues of plagiarism and unfairness can be avoided in the HSC.