The way coursework is carried out in most schools allows students ample opportunity to cheat and the unspoken truth is that teachers, parents and tutors turn a blind eye to it and, in some cases, even collude in helping.
Coursework accounts for somewhere between 20-25 per cent of a student's final grade. In English it will usually involve writing two essays of 2000 words or a piece of creative fiction and commentary in response to a piece of literature. In History it might involve a response to four different sources about a particular event or person or a written investigation into a historical problem.
Now the form and level of cheating varies hugely. The students are allowed some general feedback on their first drafts. However, some teachers go much further than this. For example, I was recently working with a student on an essay about Forster's A Passage to India and Where Angels Fear to Tread and I saw the teacher's notes. There were about 6-7 comments per paragraph and in many cases the teacher had offered a rewriting of a sentence. He referred to Italy being a place of 'passionate possibilities' in relation to Edwardian England and yet the student had not made this connection at this point in the essay, referring instead to a character's lust for Italy being attached to a lost classical world. Good point but a different point. OCR states in its marking guidelines that the teacher must 'be able to verify that the work submitted for assessment is the candidate's own work.' I am afraid that some teachers overstep the line and help write a student's essay. I would say that 10-15 per cent of this essay was nothing to do with the student and was instead the teacher's pen at work.
Of course, many teachers do not collude and maintain good practice but they should not be assessing coursework. They cannot be impartial when they need to achieve certain exam results. Once more, league tables and the whole assessment system skews the work of the teacher.
Controlled assessment is also a joke. I know lots of students who sneak work into the classrooms, use their phones and talk to one another about how to answer the question. The teachers again turn a blind eye because it is not in their interests to accuse their students of cheating.
The students who have pushy parents who pay private tutors to write their coursework or write it themselves also contribute massively to the problem. I try to give structural advice or what might be called a writing frame when students work on an essay but when you are there with them for three or four hours at a time the temptation to help them rework sections is high, but I have learned to take a step back. Ultimately you are not there to think for them and you are often long gone when results come out.
This leads me to the problem of the Internet as a source of chat rooms, essay writing forums and fraudsters willing to make a buck from writing coursework. A little Google search provides several options for students looking for people to write essays for them or download articles and copy or barely reword sections.
Mori carried out a survey into teacher's attitudes towards coursework back in 2006 and, unsurprisingly, they came out in favour of coursework for the students. Although only 29 per cent said they thought it helped the students build skills for the subject, which is surely one of the main reasons for studying, along with 25 per cent saying that it encouraged independent learning. What was even more discouraging was that only 10 per cent of teachers polled agreed that it motivated students. With such figures it doesn't really add up why teachers think coursework is useful. If it is to be representative of a student's capabilities and a way to develop skills it needs to be part of a more sustained process of assessment. The question is how to build honesty into the system and I think this needs to be tackled in several ways. No coursework outside the classroom. No league tables as it promotes dishonesty. And perhaps students should be marked by candidate numbers and by another teacher in the school or in a sister school so the work is marked with less risk of prejudice.
The problem with not tackling this is that we are creating generations of students who do not understand how to think independently and as a result they cannot truly articulate their own views.
