R
Roy672
Member
Glad to hear that so many of you have had positive outcomes. Out of interest, did the investigation strike you as a complete surprise? Or did you think that you had, in hindsight, accidentally breached a regulation unintentionally due to poor communication over the meaning of "open book" from the IFoA.
It hit me like a tone of bricks and I certainly wasn't expecting it. I debated with myself for a while over whether or not I had inadvertently breached the regulations without actually realising it. In my case, I had made my own notes using the Examiners' Reports and taken down bits of bookwork that had appeared repeatedly in past answers. I did this long before the exam moved online and open book. When the exam went ahead, I had no idea where exactly the material in my notes came from, i.e. it could be from course notes, core reading, tutorial notes, Examiners' Reports, my head etc, because the IFoA had never instructed us to reference in our notes or indeed in exams before. When we were told we could use our 'personal course notes' I took that to mean I could use the notes I'd prepared over months leading up to the exam. After all, they were personal to me. In any case, the definition of plagiarism is quoting verbatim or paraphrasing someone else's ideas without acknowledgement. Nowhere in the regulations did the IFoA prescribe a particular referencing convention. They also failed to realise that not only would verbatim material need referenced, so too would paraphrased material. I've been told by ActEd tutors in the past that if your point doesn't appear in the Examiners' Report then it's unlikely to score. Therefore, it's basically impossible to make an original point that doesn't require acknowledgement in an actuarial exam. That leads me to the bizarre conclusion that the entire exam script would require references for every single point because I don't claim ownership of any of the ideas whatsoever. Virtually every point every candidate makes in the exams comes from Core Reading. Based on that logic, we should have all been citing the Core Reading but that is of course a ridiculous suggestion. Thus, in my view, I not only did not breach a regulation, I approached the exam in a completely reasonable way that's consistent with how candidates have always approached these exams. The IFoA spectacularly failed to define their own regulations, they then wrongly interpreted those regulations and after putting us through a month from hell, they have the cheek to dismiss the allegation without an apology and with the ludicrous advice that we should just reword our answers to make them nice and different from the course material in future. Again, they forget that paraphrased material should technically also be referenced by the letter of the law and by the definition of plagiarism which is of course 'widely available online'. They seriously need to define plagiarism for themselves and for us and if they're really that concerned about how we structure sentences then provide a referencing convention and appropriate training to candidates.