Nine days to the SBA deadline: film, study guide and a classmate's idea
A student's school-based assessment portfolio is due in nine days. Her chosen text is a novel she has read once; she has also watched a two-hour film adaptation and read an online study guide's chapter summaries. Her draft argues that the novel's ending is 'unforgettable because of the film's music', and two sentences are copied nearly verbatim from the study guide with no quotation marks and no reference. A third sentence paraphrases an idea a classmate presented in class. She has about 200 words of her own close reading of one chapter. Her teacher has told the class that the portfolio must be the student's own work and must show close engagement with the text. She asks three things: can she keep the film comparison, do the study-guide sentences count as plagiarism if she changes a few words, and how should she use the remaining days.
1. Advise her on the film comparison and the borrowed material, distinguishing what is legitimate from what is not, and why.
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The film. A film adaptation is a derived text, and it is legitimate material only when it is made to do literary work. Comparing a specific moment of the prose with the choices a director must make - compression, point of view, duration - can sharpen a claim about the novel's technique. Her sentence does the opposite: 'unforgettable because of the film's music' attributes the novel's effect to another medium's device, which shows nothing about the ending on the page. Keep the comparison only if it is anchored to a passage and used to illuminate what the prose does that a film cannot.
The study guide. Verbatim copying without quotation marks and a reference is plagiarism, whatever her intention. Changing a few words does not fix it - that is patchwriting, still not her own prose, and easy for an experienced reader to detect from the register and from the sudden drop in specificity.
The classmate's idea. An idea offered aloud in class is still someone's intellectual work. If she develops it, she should acknowledge it plainly ('a point raised in class discussion suggested that...') and then add her own evidence. Acknowledgement is not a penalty; concealment is.
The principle to give her. Marks come from evidence she has generated by reading the text. The film and the guide cannot supply those, which is why reliance on them is both an honesty risk and a mark risk. She should also confirm the exact citation expectations with her teacher rather than guessing.
2. Rewrite her sentence about the ending into a defensible claim, and set out a plan for the nine days with reasons for the priorities.
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Rewrite of the claim.
'The ending is unforgettable' records a reaction; it does not yet make an argument. Rewritten: the novel teaches us across its final chapters to expect a reunion, then withholds the one sentence that would deliver it, and the withheld sentence - the white space at the foot of the page - is what makes the loss audible.
Why this works. It converts a reaction into a claim about technique (withholding, page space), it is anchored in a passage she can quote, and it is contestable, so it can be developed rather than merely repeated.
Nine-day plan.
- Days 1–2: reread the chosen chapter only, collecting eight to ten short quotations with page numbers. This is the portfolio's foundation and nothing else can substitute for it.
- Days 3–4: write two passages of close reading from those quotations - this is where the 'close engagement' requirement is met.
- Day 5: full draft, written with the study guide closed and out of sight.
- Days 6–7: redraft. Test the film sentence: does it argue something about the prose? If not, cut it.
- Day 8: citation and honesty check - every borrowed phrase quoted and referenced, the classmate's idea acknowledged.
- Day 9: proofread only; no new material.
Priority logic: the two close-reading passages carry the marks; the film and guide carry none. Two days of rereading is not lost time - it is the only part of the plan that cannot be faked.
3. She says she has 'basically read the novel' because she watched the film. Explain what the assessment is looking for that the film cannot give her, and how to check whether her own reading is doing enough work.
Read the worked answer
What the assessment rewards. The portfolio asks for evidence of a reader in sustained contact with prose: attention to a writer's language, structure and choices across a whole text, and a judgement that grows from that attention. A film gives her plot, character and mood; it cannot give her the narrator's syntax, the chapter break that lands mid-scene, the recurring image that changes meaning on its third appearance. Those are what she is being assessed on, and they are exactly what is lost in adaptation.
A self-check she can apply to any paragraph.
- Could this have been written from the film alone? If yes, it is a plot summary in disguise; cut or convert it.
- Is there a quotation, and is it discussed rather than displayed? A quotation with no commentary is decoration.
- Does the paragraph make a claim about technique, not just about what happens or how it made her feel?
- Does it say something only a reader of this text could say?
- Is every borrowed phrase visible as borrowed?
A useful exercise. Ask her to describe, in three sentences and without using the word 'scene', one thing the novel does that the film could not. If she can, she has material. If she cannot, she has not yet read the chapter closely enough, and the nine days should be spent there rather than on polishing borrowed sentences.