Exam board announces tougher system for DSE cheats

Schools will in future have to report all serious plagiarism cases found in school-based assessment projects to exam authorities during the Diploma of Secondary Education exams.

The Hong Kong Examinations and Assessment Authority said yesterday the move was aimed at ensuring that all plagiarism cases in these projects, whether identified by schools or the authority, received the same treatment.

Such projects count for 20 per cent of pupils' grades in the corresponding subjects. The decision comes after 23 pupils had their scores invalidated for plagiarism in July.

Serious plagiarism is defined by the authority as copying nearly the whole of a project paper.

Minor cases, such as copying part of the work without proper acknowledgement, would not need to be reported. But schools must keep a record of such cases and impose proper penalties, the authority said.

The 23 pupils from private secondary school Modern College were found to have plagiarised passages from the internet without citations in projects for their school-based assessment.