International Baccalaureate - Allegations of Plagiarism

Allegations of Plagiarism

After Jeffrey Beard, the director-general of International Baccalaureate, gave a talk on "Education for a Better World" on August 5, 2010 at the Chautauqua Institution in New York State, the institution issued a statement the next day in which it expressed "genuine disappointment" with the talk, noting that it "drew heavily upon and quoted extensively from a speech given earlier in the year by Sir Ken Robinson", while adding that he "neglected to cite his source or reveal the quotations for what they were". Ken Robinson is a renowned British educationist who lives in the United States. Through an IB spokesperson, Beard admitted that "he could have been more explicit about the sources and authors that inspired him for the content of this speech". In a letter sent to heads of schools that offer the IB curricula, he described this as an "unfortunate incident" due to an "oversight".

In an apparently unrelated development, the Times Educational Supplement revealed on October 8, 2010, that significant portions of some of IB's marking guides for the IB Diploma Programme were lifted wholesale from unattributed websites, including Wikipedia. In a letter to schools, IB director-general Beard wrote: "We have and always will take immediate and appropriate action when we discover any violation of our policies or standards." The examiner responsible for the plagiarism resigned from the examination board five weeks after the issue came to light.