New editing guidelines for student work in Canada may get you dinged for plagiarism if you don’t get permission from your professor to get your work edited by a third party.
In January, Editors Canada released its updated guidelines for the ethical editing of student work. Editors Canada is an organization of more than 1,300 English and French language editors concerned with rules on the ethical editing of student theses and dissertations at the graduate level.
These guidelines now cover the editing of written work at all levels of higher education, including undergraduate academia. Previously, the old guidelines, which had been in place since 2006, only governed work done at the graduate level.
The guidelines are available as a free download on the Editors Canada website.
The new guidelines come off the basis of research done by Nina Conrad, a former student at the University of British Columbia (UBC) and now a doctoral student at the University of Arizona.
She observed in her research that a greater number of undergraduate students were seeking out editing services, not just those at the graduate level.
The new guidelines say any student seeking out editing help from a third party must get written permission from their professor before doing so.
The rules also say that if a third party is editing your work, they are allowed to flag concerns but leave the correction of problems to the student, correct errors, or a combination of both.
According to University Affairs, this allows for flexibility in the process but still ensures ethical editing.
Some universities, like the graduate school at UBC, endorsed the original guidelines.
However, Editors Canada continues to look into how they can see the guidelines distributed and used more widely.
Image by Haneen AlHassoun
