The last two blog entries made mention of ideas that may be conducive for a student exploration for the new internal assessment program. A significant concern for me with the new internal assessment is plagiarism. Let me explain.

In the previous internal assessment program students wrote a report in response to instructions and questions in a portfolio task (investigation or modeling task).  Generally speaking, all of the students of a particular teacher in a Math HL or SL class would work on the same portfolio task at the same time. The teacher would have worked through the task before giving it to students and would have written some notes / markscheme to assist in scoring the students' work. Therefore, the teacher was very familiar with the task - and was able to anticipate the parts of the portfolio task that would be more challenging for the students. A prepared teacher who regular conducted checks of students progress during the time they were working on a portfolio task could - without too much difficulty - detect when a student had deceitfully copied work from a source (e.g. a fellow student or a website) or had wrongly collaborated with another student. Being very familiar with the portfolio task the teacher could also ask very specific and pertinent questions to a student that had produced suspicious work that would help determine whether the student had plagiarized.

The new internal assessment program (exploration) came out of a lengthy curriculum review process conducted by a committee of IB administrators, examiners and teachers. During this process, the IB published intermittent curriculum review reports from the committee that were made available on the Online Curriculum Centre (OCC). In the Mathematics SL and HL Curriculum Review Report published in December 2008, there were four limitations given for the then-current internal assessment program (portfolio tasks). One of them was stated as:
IA tasks produced by the IB are susceptible to plagiarism in its many and varied forms e.g. solutions to the tasks rapidly become available online. The perception of vulnerability to plagiarism is potentially as damaging as the plagiarism itself.
Yes, it was true that 'solutions' to portfolio tasks produced by the IB were available given that there were only a relatively small set of such tasks (4 to 6 for any given exam session). But, as I said, a teacher who had worked through the task and routinely checked students progress on their work on a task could spot when a students was taking inappropriate 'shortcuts'.

The new internal assessment program (exploration) will have each student writing a report on their investigation into a mathematical topic - and this topic will be different for each student. The student, with support from the teacher, is supposed to choose his/her own topic on which to investigate and then write a report. My concern is that this initial 'topic choice' phase of the exploration could be an area where some students will purposely choose a topic based on what has the most material easily available on websites. Since it will be impossible for a teacher to be acutely familiar with all the topics being investigated by all of his/her students, it will be even more difficult than with the previous IA program (portfolios) for a teacher to detect plagiarism.

In my next blog entry, I will discuss some ideas on communicating with students about what precisely plagiarism is (especially in the context of writing about mathematics) and how to avoid it. One important ingredient in helping to prevent plagiarism is to be very clear with your students about the rules - of the IB and your school - concerning plagiarism, and to give them practical and useful guidelines about how and when to cite sources appropriately.