Experiences with plagiarism/collusion

[ninwa]

Has anyone here had experience with being accused of plagiarism/collusion at uni, or knows someone who did?

What generally happens? What processes do you go through? What kinds of punishments are most common?

I'm asking for someone (A) who has had his assignment queried for plagiarism. A's friend, B, was struggling with the assignment, so A emailed his completed one to B, and B ended up copying parts of it and submitting it as her own.

A has evidence that it's his assignment and that he emailed it to B etc etc

[MonsieurHulot]

My brother's friend was in exactly the same situation; he showed his essay to a friend and that essay was subsequently plagiarised. Per uni rules, both parties were at risk of expulsion, but it didn't turn out that harshly. The plagiariser failed that subject and had the offence noted on his record, and my brother's friend only failed the subject.

[MJRomeo81]

A & B are both in trouble here. Assisting another person to plagiarise material may be punished as severely as plagiarism itself (especially if the material was intended to be submitted as assessment).

A has evidence that it's his assignment and that he emailed it to B etc etc

While A has demonstrated that the work is their own, the evidence will also condemn A for collusion.

I heard of a similar case in an intro IT class (someone copied an entire spreadsheet to another student, and then both students submitted the exact same spreadsheet). In this case, the person who copied failed the subject and the person who sent the work only received 0 for the assignment.

So I would argue that the punishment is correlated to the year level of the subject.

Here is a recent article on plagiarism, from the perspective of a senior tutor - http://www.theage.com.au/opinion/politics/in-a-knowledge-economy-plagiarism-is-just-a-matter-of-degree-20120823-24oyx.html

[ninwa]

It sounds like the copier (B) will be punished more harshly than the sender (A)?

[lynt.br]

aaaaaand time to add a disclaimer for my law notes thread :/

[sahil26]

What if B secretly copied/ stole A's work and made it his own?

Would A still get in trouble?

[slothpomba]

Is it possible to mention which university they go to? Different uni's have different procedures.

They need to work out what their story is as well, obviously. It looks like A and B are both in the shit and they need to figure out if they're going to say it as what it is.

It can get into pretty serious shit, monash actually has a law (monash university act 2009) that lets it deal with things like this.

Here's a good idea of some of the things that can go down ( http://adm.monash.edu/legal/legislation/council-regulations/student-discipline-regulations-aust-and-msa.pdf ).

At least under the Monash statues, not only is cheating an offense but so is assisting to cheat, both of them are in the shit. If it gets to the committee, you're allowed to have a lawyer if you so choose, so, that kind of illustrates how serious it can get.

They're not there to totally destroy you and i'm sure they're compassionate but your friends really needs to start getting multiple balls rolling. Get in touch with the student union, see if they can help, i know at monash they have people assigned to these things. Make sure they also know what exactly is going on.

[slothpomba]

Just found the penalties that are usually imposed at monash:

[ninwa]

It was UoM and has been sorted out now, but thanks anyway