On GCSEs and a cure for Plagiarism (perhaps!)

Its good to read that GCSE home course work will be scrapped, as the powers that be catch up with what the rest of us have known for a long long time.

• Some parents' have been doing their children's coursework.
• Some teachers have known that parents have been doing coursework and have been unable or unwilling to do anything about it.

• Some children have been copying and pasting from the Internet (without acknowledging the original source).
• Some parents have been copying and pasting from the Internet (without acknowledging the original source).
• Some teachers have known that children and their parents have been copying and pasting from the Internet (without acknowledging the original source) and have been unable or unwilling to do anything about it.

Now, from 2009 coursework will be done in school under supervision, where pupils working on projects alone or in groups will be monitored by teachers with access to printed resources, the Internet and other sources of information being controlled.
The subjects affected by the new measures are, business studies, classical subjects, economics, English literature, modern foreign languages, history, geography, social sciences and religious studies.

Furthermore "coursework or controlled assessment" will be set and moderated by the exam boards, and about time! This is almost a level playing field.

But there is still further work to be done.

Children and teachers in the primary and secondary school systems will need training in how to acknowledge or "cite" the use of someone else's work, particularly when using materials found on the Internet. As the ways we access, sample and mash up digital resources increase it is vital that the present generation of digital natives need to be taught how to reference their sources.

Only then can the problem of plagiarism in Higher Education be properly addressed.