Not so fresh in the mind: a forensic linguistic analysis of suspected memorized narrative essays

Abstract

The Hong Kong Certificate of Education (HKCE) English Language writing exam is taken by more than 110, 000 fifth-form students every year. The candidates are required to write a narrative, discursive or descriptive essay of approximately 300 words. During the marking process, some 150–200 scripts are usually identified as ‘memorized’ and tagged for special marking. About a third of these are finally assessed as being wholly or partly memorized and are penalized through having the memorized parts disregarded. Until recently, the assessment process has been a wholly subjective and ‘unscientific’ one. Newly developed software, however, has allowed for a swifter and more systematic analysis of such scripts and revealed a previously unsuspected degree of sophistication in the use of memorized material