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8 Academic Misconduct


In any academic activity at the College, students are responsible and accountable for academic integrity. Academic misconduct will be disciplined according to the severity of the offence. Those who are found to have repeated offences will be progressively disciplined.

In addition to the areas of academic misconduct outlined in this section, offences involving civil or criminal law involving academic work or materials are subject to penalties under this procedure. Students should also be aware that other types of misconduct may be dealt with by the College under other procedures such as the Code of Conduct procedure, the Information Technology Acceptable Use procedure, the Ontario Human Rights Code or the Criminal Code or the Criminal Code of Canada.

Work that is submitted for credit as group work will usually receive a grade that is recorded identically for each member of the group. If academic misconduct is identified for group work, the process will proceed individually for every member of the group, except in cases where one or more members of the group (a subset of the group) are identified to be responsible for the misconduct. This may occur by an admission of responsibility by a subset of the group and a disavowal of responsibility by the other members, or may be determined by discovery of fact and a decision based on balance of probability. In this situation, the process continues only for, and penalties are applied only to, the responsible subset of the group. If such a subset is not identified to be responsible, the group as a whole has collective and individual responsibility for the misconduct (as it has benefit for the credit) and the process and penalties are applied to each individual member of the group.

Under the Freedom of Information and Protection of Privacy Act, respondents have the right to know that information has been collected about them. If any action is to be taken against respondents in an area of academic misconduct, the respondents have the right to know the allegations against them and enough information about the complaint to be able to defend themselves.

The following six areas constitute the major types of academic misconduct and are subject to penalties. Please note that misconduct on one or any portion of a work constitutes misconduct; there are no partial culpability or penalty options. No fees are refunded to students who are dismissed from the College for misconduct.

Download the chart of the Penalties for Academic Misconduct

Cheating
Cheating is the use of inappropriate, unallowed or unacknowledged materials, information or aids in any academic work. The use of books, notes, calculators and conversation with others is restricted or forbidden in many instances of academic work and their use constitutes cheating. Students may not request others (including commercial or free term-paper organizations) to conduct research or prepare any work for them. Students may not submit identical work, or portions thereof, for credit or honours more than once without prior approval.

Fabrication
Fabrication is the falsification or invention of any information or citation in an academic work. Invented information may not be used in any laboratory experiment or other academic work without the prior authorization of the instructor. It would be considered misconduct, for instance, to analyze one sample in an experiment and invent data based on that single experiment for several more required analyses. The actual and original source of the information must be acknowledged in a citation.

Plagiarism
Plagiarism is the representation of the words or ideas of another as one’s own in any academic work. To avoid plagiarism, every direct quotation must be identified and properly cited in the text or as noted in Cites and Sources, Georgian College’s guide to the APA style of documentation. For more information, see section 7.2.4, Acknowledgement of Sources.

Acknowledgement of sources is required when material from another source, stored in print, electronic or other medium, is quoted, paraphrased or summarized in whole or in part. Instructors have the right to submit a student’s work for electronic detection of plagiarism or to require that the student submit his or her own work for detection of same. Students should be aware that plagiarism of any part of a work is academic misconduct; there is no partial culpability or penalty. Plagiarism can be subtle, so it should be discussed with the instructor. A recommended source for more information about plagiarism and how to avoid it, can be viewed at http://cai.ucdavis.edu/plagiarism.html

Facilitating Academic Misconduct
Students who knowingly or negligently allow their work or portions of their work or drafts of their work to be used by other students or who otherwise aid others in committing academic misconduct are violating academic integrity. This applies to students who hide, misrepresent or falsify information related to an incident of academic misconduct. Such students are as guilty as a student who receives and uses the material or is involved in the incident directly, even though they may not themselves benefit from that act of misconduct.

Denying Access to Information or Material
It is a breach of academic integrity to deny others access to academic resources or to deliberately impede the progress of another student or scholar. This would include giving other students false or misleading information, making library or shared resource material unavailable to others by stealing, deliberately misplacing, defacing or destroying any of these resources, including computer files that are not one’s own.

Copyright
Under Canada’s Copyright Act, it is illegal to copy most published materials without permission. Georgian College has signed a licence with CANCOPY (the Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency) that allows copying within certain guidelines. Copying guidelines are posted at all photocopiers and further information can be obtained by contacting the Purchasing department at (705) 728-1968, ext. 5209. Copying beyond the limits of the licence is a violation of the College’s agreement with CANCOPY, and possibly a violation of the Copyright Act. Liability for these actions will rest with the individual.

  • 8.1 Academic Misconduct Process

    In all instances, the instructor will keep and secure any and all documents related to an incident until the process is complete. When an instructor suspects an offence has occurred, the student(s) will be required to meet with the instructor within five working days to discuss the incident. If the situation is shown, to the instructor’s satisfaction, to be free of academic misconduct, no record will be kept of the incident.

    If the instructor or program co-ordinator determines that an offence has occurred, perhaps without identifying the offenders or severity of the offence completely, a formal process will be started and records will be kept. The process involves the following:

    • The first part of an Academic Misconduct form (available online at
      www.georgiancollege.ca/academics/forms and in all program areas) will be completed
      by the instructor for every student involved in the incident. The Office of the Registrar will
      be contacted to determine if previous instances of academic misconduct are on file for those
      students. A previous incidence will determine the minimum penalty available as per the
      Penalties for Academic Misconduct chart;
    • The student(s) will be required to meet with the instructor and a witness (preferably the
      program co-ordinator or College-wide co-ordinator or counsellor) within five working days
      of the form being completed to discuss the offence. The student(s) will meet individually with
      the instructor and a witness. The witness will keep notes during this discussion, and a copy
      of the Academic Misconduct form(s) will be given to the student(s). If individual responsibility
      in a group situation can be established by balance of probabilities
      (see section 9, Appeals, for definition) to the satisfaction of both the instructor and witness during
      this stage, the process is discontinued for members of the group that do not bear responsibility for
      the incident and the Academic Misconduct form for the latter are destroyed. If any student is
      unresponsive or unwilling to meet, the process will move to the next step after the five days have
      elapsed;
    • The Academic Misconduct form and the notes will be passed on to the office of the dean of the
      student’s program. The student(s) will be required to meet with the instructor (and/or witness)
      and the dean or designate of the student’s program within five working days of the meeting with
      the instructor to discuss and make the decisions required in the second part of the form. The
      signature of the student and the dean or designate acknowledge the decision made by the student.
      The next steps arising from the decision made by the student are discussed with the student. If the
      student is unresponsive or unwilling to meet, the Academic Misconduct form is forwarded to the
      Office of the Registrar for processing. Only the dean or designate will sign in this instance;
    • If the student wishes to appeal the sanction, he or she must follow the appeal procedures outlined
      in Part 2 of section 9.2.1. Otherwise, the registrar will process the sanction within five working
      days. A revelation of previous offence(s) from the student’s record may result in the penalty being
      increased, and the student will be so notified. The Academic Misconduct form will remain part of
      the student’s file in the Office of the Registrar for one year after leaving Georgian College.
      No indication of academic misconduct will be made on a student grade report or transcript. As with
      other documents in the student’s file, access is restricted by the Freedom of Information and
      Protection of Privacy Act as noted in section 6, Academic Records.