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2. Before you start your HSC
2.1 Maintaining honesty and integrity
Honesty is key for all students and staff
All HSC candidates, their teachers and others who guide them must comply with our Honesty in HSC Assessment – the Standard to maintain the integrity of the HSC. You should also read your course syllabuses and related NESA policies, such as those on malpractice and satisfactory completion of a course, on our website.
You must be honest when completing all your school-based assessment tasks, exams and submitted works.
Always acknowledge your sources
You must acknowledge any part of your work that was written, created or developed by someone other than you. This includes any material from other sources, for example:
- books
- journals
- electronic resources
- the internet.
For practical works, this includes work undertaken by others.
You do not need to formally acknowledge material that you learnt from your teacher in class.
2.2 Understanding malpractice
Cheating of any kind is unacceptable
Behaving dishonestly to gain an unfair advantage in assessments or exams is malpractice or cheating. Any form of malpractice, including plagiarism, is unacceptable. We treat allegations of malpractice very seriously. Identified malpractice may result in a penalty such as reduction in marks, cancellation of your results in the course or cancellation of your HSC. Serious and deliberate malpractice is corrupt conduct, which we can report to the Independent Commission Against Corruption.
Malpractice includes:
- copying part or all of someone else’s work and presenting it as your own
- using material directly from books, journals, electronic media or the internet without acknowledging its source
- building on someone else’s ideas without stating their source
- buying, stealing or borrowing someone else’s work and presenting it as your own
- submitting work that someone else, eg, a parent, tutor or subject expert, substantially contributed to
- using someone else’s words, ideas, designs or work in projects and performance tasks without mentioning the source
- paying someone to write or prepare material and presenting it as your own
- not acknowledging any work completed by others for your submitted work or performance
- breaching school exam rules
- cheating in an HSC exam
- using non-approved aids in a school-based assessment task
- giving false reasons for not handing in work by the due date
- helping another student to engage in malpractice
providing fraudulent evidence in applications for disability provisions or illness/misadventure
- being responsible for actions done or omitted to be done that confer an unfair advantage relating to the outcome of any HSC exam – irrespective of whether such actions occur before, during or after such an exam or assessment.
You might need to prove your work is your own
If you are suspected of malpractice, you will need to show that all unacknowledged work is entirely your own. You might need to:
- prove and explain your work process with diaries, journals, notes, working plans, sketches or progressive drafts that show how your ideas developed
- answer questions about the assessment task, exam or submitted work being investigated to show your knowledge, understanding and skills.