Can you fail english exam for plagiarism?

[LFC_Kero]

alright cheers guys!

[AmericanBeauty]

You will NEVER fail a VCE English exam for plagiarism. Copy what you like word for word mate. Seriously, do you really think the examiners go out of their way to try and catch this?

Don't do it for SACs since your teacher knows you personally. A random examiner doesn't even know your name.

Until VCAA start using OCR software to assess the papers you have nothing to worry about.

This guy knows what he is talking about.

It's barely plagiarism. I could just memorise an essay on here and regurgitate it out. I'd be shooting myself in the foot if it had nothing to do with the prompt. But if you think taking ideas from another person is plagiarism, then lock me up now because I've gotten so many ideas and model answers from VCAA report answers.

[jeanweasley]

Hmm, probably not but then again if you plagiarise now, what's stopping you from plagiarising in the future, especially if you are wishing to go to university where there's a strict no plagiarism policy?

[brenden]

This guy knows what he is talking about.

It's barely plagiarism. I could just memorise an essay on here and regurgitate it out. I'd be shooting myself in the foot if it had nothing to do with the prompt. But if you think taking ideas from another person is plagiarism, then lock me up now because I've gotten so many ideas and model answers from VCAA report answers.

...It is literally the definition of plagiarism to regurgitate someone else's work.

[AmericanBeauty]

...It is literally the definition of plagiarism to regurgitate someone else's work.

If VCAA ever recognised it, then bravo to them. But in saying that, if I had recently read an essay and it fit the prompt perfectly, I wouldn't feel morally bad about taking some ideas from an essay. It is literally the same as working out of someone else's notes through a textbook.

[literally lauren]

There's a difference between taking some ideas/interpretations and straight out copying someone else's work.

Someone asked this question in my class last year, and my teacher said he was correcting an essay that sounded a little bit rote-learned. He consulted with some other markers and they noticed there was about half a paragraph that stood out as poorly written, but relevant, and the rest was all just sophisticated gibberish. They googled a few excerpts (and yes, AN results do show up on google) and sure enough they found a version of that essay online. The convention in these cases is to simply cross out everything that's not your own work, and mark what's left. So this kid ended up getting a two for the half paragraph that s/he'd tried to write.

The markers aren't idiots, and they have a very good radar for this sort of stuff. You're doing VCE for the first time; they've gone through the system year after year and marked hundreds, even thousands of essays.

So you might not fail exactly, but you can potentially have an entire essay score (or three) nullified. So yeah, don't bother.

[LiquidPaperz]

just wanted to add - you might want to look at that ad in the bottom

[keltingmeith]

If VCAA ever recognised it, then bravo to them. But in saying that, if I had recently read an essay and it fit the prompt perfectly, I wouldn't feel morally bad about taking some ideas from an essay. It is literally the same as working out of someone else's notes through a textbook.

"Taking some ideas from" and "plagiarising from" are two completely different things, though.

[literally lauren]

just wanted to add - you might want to look at that ad in the bottom

Even the random internet ad generator agrees with me 

[appleandbee]

It's just not worth the risk!

If you fail English, you automatically do the same for VCE.

But using other people's examples (like in context) is fine, as long as you make your own interpretation and analysis of it.

[LiquidPaperz]

It's just not worth the risk!

If you fail English, you automatically do the same for VCE.

But using other people's examples (like in context) is fine, as long as you make your own interpretation and analysis of it.

look if you can remember it i guess all credit to you. You can only regurgitate what you can remember, if you can remember all you can cheat for the whole thing essentially.

I know someone who got a 47, and he said his whole essay was rote learned, and quoted "if you search a line of my essay, you'll find a lot of matches"

[literally lauren]

I know someone who got a 47, and he said his whole essay was rote learned, and quoted "if you search a line of my essay, you'll find a lot of matches"

These people are the minority. Of course you don't hear about people who cheated and were caught; why would they advertise the fact that you were dumb enough to do something like that?

OP, it is hypothetically possible that you could cheat and not get caught, as has happened before I'm sure. But in the end the assessors can distinguish between people who've made a genuine attempt to engage with the prompt and adapt what they know, from those who spit out anything and everything they know, and fortune/bell curves favor the first group.

I, and many others would advise against it for both pragmatic and moral reasons, but it's your future you're risking so whatevs.

/endthread