The External Investigation Under Time Pressure
An external assessment task requires students to investigate a real organisation's information system and produce a report analysing its strengths and weaknesses against a supplied framework. Students have four weeks and must submit a 2,000-word report plus an appendix of evidence. A student, Mei, chooses a small retail business owned by her aunt. She interviews her aunt, photographs the point-of-sale screen, and includes a screenshot showing customer names and partial card numbers. She also quotes an internal email from the aunt criticising a supplier. Mei's report is strong on analysis but the appendix contains the personal data and the email. The task sheet says students must 'observe confidentiality and privacy requirements' and 'obtain permission for any evidence included.' Mei says her aunt gave verbal permission for everything. The teacher must decide whether to accept the submission and what feedback to give before the external marking.
1. Identify the ethical and legal issues in Mei's appendix and explain what the teacher should do.
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The appendix breaches privacy and confidentiality expectations. The screenshot contains customer names and partial card numbers, which are personal information; including them without consent from those customers is inappropriate even with the business owner's verbal permission, because the owner cannot consent on behalf of customers. The quoted internal email criticising a supplier is confidential business communication and could harm the supplier relationship. The task sheet explicitly requires confidentiality and permission, so the teacher should not accept the appendix as submitted. The teacher should require Mei to redact the personal data (blur or replace names and numbers) and to remove or anonymise the email quote, replacing it with a paraphrase that conveys the issue without identifying the supplier. The teacher should also require written permission from the aunt rather than relying on a verbal claim, and document the advice given.
2. Explain how the teacher should balance supporting Mei with maintaining the integrity of the external assessment.
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The teacher can give process feedback - pointing out the privacy breach and asking Mei to redact and obtain written permission - without supplying the analysis or rewriting content. This supports learning while preserving integrity, because the substantive work remains Mei's. The teacher must not mark the appendix as acceptable or ignore the breach, since that would condone non-compliance and disadvantage students who followed the rules. The teacher should set a clear deadline for the corrected appendix before external submission and record the interaction. If Mei cannot obtain permission in time, the teacher should advise removing the evidence rather than submitting it unredacted. The teacher should also check whether the school's own privacy policy applies to student investigations of real organisations, and apply it consistently to the whole class.