I am obligated to send these cases to the Faculty because making decisions about academic misconduct (and academic sanctions) is beyond my pay grade. When I notice something suspicious, I am required to document my findings and send them to a higher authority. No, not God: the Faculty of Science Associate Dean (Undergraduate), who then forwards the case to the discipline team, which includes a Special Advisor (Discipline) in the Faculty of Science, to determine whether there has been a violation of the Code of Student Behaviour.
The Academic Offenses
Obviously, for reasons of privacy, I cannot say much about the particular cases, or give any information that may identify the offenders. However, it is informative to look at what got these students into trouble. In all three cases, the common thread was that students misrepresented others’ work as their own. More specifically, in all three cases, there were passages from published works that the student either failed to attribute to the original authors, or did a poor job of attribution.
In all three cases this year, there were numerous incidents of direct quotes (or poorly paraphrased near-direct quotes) from other sources that appeared in the student’s written work. Including direct quotes is not inherently bad, and won’t necessarily get you in trouble. (In scientific writing, it is considered poor practice to include direct quotes; in a paper for an English class, on the other hand, direct quotes from the source material are used to support an argument.) When a student submits a paper, it is assumed that they are handing in their own work--with the exception of passages drawn from external sources, which must be clearly indicated as such. It may be that it’s an oops! moment. A student just forgets to put in quotation marks, or misses citing a source. You know what? That’s still academic dishonesty. If it happens once in a paper, it’s more likely to be forgiven than when every page contains substantial passages from someone else’s work that are not cited. In the cases I dealt with, there were many, many problematic instances--dozens, in fact. Don’t underestimate your instructors; we are pretty finely attuned to the difference between the writing of an undergraduate and that of a career academic, and the more there are, the more likely we are to find them.
The Academic Sanctions
In two of the cases, the penalty was that the students were given a mark of zero on their assignments. In the other case, however, there was a particular combination of factors that resulted in a harsher penalty of a failing grade and a comment of Failure Due to Inappropriate Academic Behavior added to the person’s transcript. This is not something you want on your transcript, whether you’re applying to graduate school, or for a job. It does not look good.
Although I don’t have any insight into the mind of the Deans, some factors that are known to affect the severity of academic sanctions include:
- previous history of academic dishonesty
- the level of the course and student (first-year vs. fourth-year; the latter are expected to be fully knowledgeable about what constitutes academic dishonesty and how to avoid it)
- the nature of the offence (a couple of slip-ups, or widespread copying-and-pasting)
The Prevention
One reason why cheating occurs is that a student doesn’t know they are doing it. An easy way to address this is to develop skills in citing, quoting, summarizing, and paraphrasing. The Centre for Teaching and Learning has a collection of brief videos to help you learn these skills, and introduce you to academic culture.
Another reason given for cheating is that students run out of time to do a proper job. To avoid a time crunch, start early. There’s loads of good advice on how to avoid procrastination. Students in my classes know the details of every assignment in the term on the first day. You could start working on your end-of-term paper on the first day of classes! Okay, I realize that’s not practical. So I gave my class a soft deadline: they are to email me their choice of term paper topic by the mid-point in the term. In this way, I am making them start to think about their paper well before it’s due. (What’s a soft deadline? There is no penalty for not submitting it--but students will get an annoying reminder from me.)
Cases of academic misconduct make me cranky, for different reasons. First, in cases of willful misconduct, the student thinks they can get away with it. That’s a gamble I wouldn’t take. My teaching assistants and I are pretty sharp--and TAs get a mercenary glint in their eyes when encountering suspicious activity.
Second, it take a lot of time to write up a misconduct report. Two of the cases this year took me 10 hours just to go through the papers line-by-line and determine which sentences were plagiarized. Then it was another couple of hours to write the letters to the Dean. All this took time away from marking term papers, which is literally my busiest time of year. I will not be feeling any kindness or sympathy when I write up the academic misconduct report.
Finally, thanks to the vast majority of students who maintain their academic integrity, and earn their grades the hard way!
Why aren’t you studying?
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