Will copy/pasting from the Question paper onto the word come under plagiarism?

While creating the 'audit trail' for paper 1 and 'summary' for paper 2 will it be considered a breach of the IFoA assessment regulations if I copy from the background section of the question paper, paste it on my word document and then paraphrase it according to myself.

 

I'm interested in this answer too.
For the charts in paper 2 I have been copying the question text into my spreadsheet so that I can easily check I'm doing exactly what's been asked. I was thinking I could leave the question text in there - imagining that it would make it a tiny bit easier for the marker to see what's what as well. I never thought about it being plagiarism under the wording of the assessment regulations.

 

The plagairism rules seem to focus on the source materials you're using, not the exam paper itself. I'm afraid I'm not 100% sure where copying and pasting the exam paper falls here, but I would avoid doing it. The regs say that you can't try to pass off someone else's work as your own, so I suppose this would include the author of the exam paper. Full guidance on plagairism can be found here and it does say that you shouldn't paraphrase.

Page 7 of the Guide to CP2 (the 'Professional conduct during the exam' section) has some extra guidance about this:

In Paper 2, you must write the Summary document without the use of template headings and without copying large sections from the Examination Question (including the audit trail found within this paper). Candidates who copy large sections of the information in the exam question and/or the audit trail provided into their Summary document, without consideration of the purpose of the Summary document or the target audience, are likely to gain very little credit from the examiners.​

The Examiners will be very familiar with the exam paper and background information, so if, for example, you're drafting the Summary by copying and pasting chunks of the audit trail and changing a few words, then the Examiner will pick up on this. I think it's a safer technique to draft everything in your own words from scratch. Some of the advice in this post might be of help.

As for copying question text into the Paper 2 spreadsheet, I'm not 100% sure about this either, but it feels to me like you're just repeating an instruction you've been given rather than trying to pass someone else's work off as your own. I could be missing something here. Probably safer to have titles for your graphs that closely match the question wording and tick them off on the question paper as you go.

 

Thank you. This is what I wanted clarification on as I read in some of the examiner's reports that pre templates were used when it came to assumptions etc.

 

I think what the Examiners are referring to there is people simply copying and pasting things from generic lists of assumptions, which aren't related to the scenario, e.g. just saying something like "There are no unusual events". What you write in your Audit Trail and Summary should be specific to the scenario you're working with, so make sure you tailor what you're writing.

Also, going off on a bit of a tangent here, in the Summary Report it's OK to just bring across the assumptions from the Audit Trail in the background information. Make sure you update them if required though, e.g. if your spreadsheet work means the original assumptions don't apply. This is really the only place where it's OK to just bring in the background information unedited. You generally get one mark for bringing the assumptions from the Audit Trail into the Summary Report, so you need to add to these to get full marks for assumptions in the Summary.

 

So if I copy/paste from the audit trail into the summary and then change the assumptions etc. accordingly it won't be considered plagiarism right?

 

In the case of the assumptions in the audit trail, I think that's fine. Otherwise I would avoid it.