A reflection on ethics in my practice.
The digital age has brought with it a minefield of potential ethical dilemmas, but with advance thought and planning to put procedures in place, the stress and angst for all can be minimised.
Plagiarism in Internal Assessment
My reflection follows the DIEP model as used by the University of Melbourne, and discusses an incident of plagiarism uncovered in my department last year.
Describe what happened
One of our internal assessments for Languages is to produce a portfolio of writing in the target language. The standard is very flexible allowing for a range of topics and text types to be produced. The criteria for the assessment of the standard is clear but the way in which it is administered is left entirely up to teachers and departments.
Some schools insist on all work being carried out in class under the teacher’s eye, with only print resources available for reference and not the internet or anything electronic. This is the way writing assessments used to be carried out years ago, and for teachers who continue to assess this way they can be sure the work handed in is authentic and chances of cheating are minimised.
However the Languages department at our school embraces the use of technology in our teaching and learning, and we also understand that some students do their best work at 2am in their own space at home. Some people really get into the topic they are writing about and they want to spend more time on it than we can afford to give in class. So we operate on a high trust model but we have robust schoolwide procedures that we follow to check for authenticity.
Unfortunately, on the odd occasion a student does try to copy something they have found on the internet. Last year a student from the Spanish class handed in a film review which was suspiciously good. The student had not submitted a draft for feedback and the teacher had not seen any of this work being completed in class time. The work was submitted in a google doc and the teacher could see from the history that it had been pasted as a whole block.
Interpret the events
So following the processes set out in our school guidelines, the teacher had a “conversational check” to see if the student knew what she had written.
When the teacher was not satisfied with the answers given she called me in as HOD and we questioned the student together. A confession from the student followed and as we had clearly defined processes in place we were able to follow these without having to angst over the personal situation of the student or the circumstances of the breach.
Evaluate the effectiveness
When the incident occurred I felt fortunate that our school had such robust assessment procedures in place. Our NZQA liaison officer has put a lot of time and effort into creating documents covering our policies and procedures which are shared with students, parents and teachers so everyone is clear on what is expected of them and what will happen should breaches occur. This makes occurrences of plagiarism rare, and when it did occur the pressure was off the teacher and myself as HOD when it came to dealing with the student and we were able to show our core value pono by acting in a respectful and fair manner, following a transparent process.
Plan for the future
Our department is already in the habit of going through assessment procedures with our students at the start of the year. However the student involved in this particular case was not a native English speaker, and she joined the class later in the year after the assessment discussions had already taken place. Our plan for the future is to ensure that whenever a new student joins a senior class we make sure she is given the assessment policies and procedures document and that we check that she understands it.
Our students are our most important stakeholders and while we want each individual to achieve highly, the integrity of the system and the fairness to all students means we need to consider the implications of any ethical decisions we make not just on the whole of the current cohort but on future ones as well.
References
Image - By Madhumathi S V (Own work) [CC BY-SA 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0)], via Wikimedia Commons
DIEP model - University of Melbourne - Academic Skills video
Education Council. (2017). Our Code Our Standards.Retrieved from: https://educationcouncil.org.nz/sites/default/files/Our%20Code%20Our%20Standards%20web%20booklet%20FINAL.pdf
