Exam board reduces penalty for DSE cheats
Appeal committee decides to grade exams but not projects of pupils who copied from internet
The 23 pupils from Modern College whose Chinese-language scores were invalidated for plagiarism have had their penalties reduced and were given partial grades in the subject, the examination board said yesterday.
The private secondary school pupils had received no score in the Diploma of Secondary Education subject after they were found to have plagiarised passages from the internet without citations in projects for the school-based assessment for the subject, which accounted for 20 per cent of the grade.
We consider the penalty of disqualification appropriate for serious cases of plagiarism," she said. "But based on the principle of fairness, we'd like to apply the same penalty for similar cases
After seven pupils appealed the decision, the Examinations and Assessment Authority said yesterday that its Appeal Review Committee had decided to invalidate all of the projects but would grade the pupils' exam papers.
The committee found in the course of its investigation that another three candidates from the college were caught plagiarising in their projects, but only their project grades had been invalidated as they had been caught by the school and not the authority, said authority spokeswoman Christina Lee Wong-wai.
Lee said if schools found plagiarism, they could choose to give no score for just the projects, but if the authority found such cases, they would disqualify the pupil from all subject grades.
"We consider the penalty of disqualification appropriate for serious cases of plagiarism," she said. "But based on the principle of fairness, we'd like to apply the same penalty for similar cases."