Academic misconduct numbers are out for 2012-13, and as reported to Carleton’s Senate by the Senate Student Academic Integrity Appeals Committee (SAIAC), plagiarism is by far the most common violation.
It makes up 351 out of 561 cases of academic integrity violations.
The second and third most frequent cases of violation are 76 cases of “unauthorized cooperation and collaboration,” and 57 “tests and examinations” violations.
The Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences (FASS) reports the highest number of plagiarism cases, with 147—over 40 per cent of the total.
It is the second-largest faculty, with 5,290 undergraduate students in 2012-13.
Ryan Flannagan, director of student affairs and secretary of SAIAC, said via email that FASS may have the highest number of plagiarism cases because students in the faculty receive more essay and long-answer assignments than other faculties, with the exception of public affairs.
“Plagiarism is much more likely to be found within an essay than labs, group assignments, and tests, which are more common in Engineering and Design and the Faculty of Science,” Flannagan said.
The academic integrity policy, which governs academic violations, does not call for specific violations to have specific penalties attached to them, said Michael Mac Neil, associate law professor and chair of SAIAC.
Penalties are left to the associate deans of the faculties who hear the cases, he said.
“There are a range of factors that the policy indicates should be taken into account in deciding on the appropriate penalty,” Mac Neil said.
He said the factors include whether the violation was intentional or the result of negligence, what year the student is in, and how extensive the violation was—“was it just a few lines in a single long paper or was it most of the paper?” he said.
Carleton has reported a higher number of academic integrity violations than the University of Ottawa, according to the Ottawa Citizen.
Flannagan and Mac Neil said the two universities should not be compared with each other.
“There may be things that we are including in our data that they are not. There may be things that we find is inappropriate conduct which they do not,” Mac Neil said.
Flannagan called it an “apple and orange” comparison.
“Rest assured that uOttawa and Carleton treat academic honesty the same way—very seriously,” he said.
As for the steady rise in the number of cases in the last few years, also reported by the Ottawa Citizen, Flannagan said there are two reasons it has occurred—the increasing number of students, and an increasing number of professors using the official policy.
“Previous to this, it wasn’t uncommon for individual faculty to deal with the infractions directly,” he said. “As more faculty get comfortable and use the Policy it has led to more students going through the formal process and being counted in our annual numbers.”
Mac Neil said minor changes are coming for a “fine-tuning” of the policy, including more clearly identifying the range of sanctions imposed for a violation.
Flannagan said students will not notice a difference in how the policy operates.
