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Students stuffing microphones into their shirts, notes into their underpants and smuggling smartphones into exam rooms are just a few of the thousand ways they attempted to cheat last year's Higher School Certificate according to new data released by the Board of Studies on Wednesday.
Among the 75,000 teenagers who took the final year exam last year was a student who wired herself up through an earpiece and a microphone in her sleeve to get answers from a friend outside the exam room, while another tried to convince an examiner that reading off their smartphone in the middle of the exam was "rote learning".
"What these kids forget is that while it might be their first time in a HSC exam room, teachers have been doing it for many, many years" the president of Board of Studies, Teaching and Educational Studies NSW Tom Alegounarias said. "So if it is the notes stuffed down the underpants, scrawled on the hands, or the earphone creeping up your ear, we've seen it all before."
It took seven years for the Board of Studies to institute regulations recommended by the Independent Commission Against Corruption (ICAC). Under the regulations, which came into effect in 2014, every school in NSW was required to record any HSC student who plagiarised, asked or paid someone to do their work.
The former principal of PLC Sydney, William McKeith, advocated for the move in 2007 because half the mark for each HSC course is determined by the student's school. "It could be a deficiency that we do not know how many incidents of plagiarism in assessment tasks are routinely identified and what action each school took against the offender," he told the ICAC.
The period was also marked by controversial private colleges completing major works on behalf of students, which sparked the investigation.
The crackdown revealed that English students are the worst offenders in the state. A hundred and ninety-one HSC English students picked up malpractice offences across the English Studies, Standard English and English Advanced courses. By contrast, Mathematics only racked up 16 offences in total.
There were over 150 cases of "non-certifiable projects" which included students buying essays, creative writing or other pieces from online services and submitting it as their own project for major works such as English Extension two where assignments are worth between 50 and 100 per cent of their total HSC mark for that subject.
The propensity for students to pass off someone else's work as their own went beyond the major works and into the minor assignments, with 76 per cent of those who cheated on written assignments doing so before the final round of assessment.
Mr Alegounarias said for the comparatively small number of students who did cheat "the effort just was not worth it".
"It is more stress working out a way to cheat than focusing on best result you can get. Students are less anonymous to their school teacher than they are at university".
He acknowledged that you can never expunge online assignment purchases all together but that while there are schools that do use plagiarism detection software, teachers are far more likely to pick it up than lecturers as they know their students' individual capabilities.
The data also showed where the highest levels of misadventure and illness applications came from in NSW for the HSC exams.
Private schools had slightly higher levels of illness or misadventure applications across the state.