Faculty members must report incidents of academic misconduct using the Academic Misconduct Incident Report Form. They can include a description of the incident in the narrative section of the form. Supporting documentation must also be provided.
Together, the report and documentation provide a full record of the incident. This allows others who may help resolve the matter to understand and respond to the incident.
Supporting documentation includes:
The narrative section of the Academic Misconduct Incident Report Form can include information not captured by the supporting documentation. This may consist of details such as:
Focus on facts. Don't include conclusions, suppositions or allegations of prior academic misconduct.
The students involved either sought and received or provided unauthorized aid on a case assignment. A detailed description of what happened is attached. All students accepted responsibility other than [REDACTED], who claimed he was working with [REDACTED] as a partner, and was unaware [REDACTED] had obtained documents from [REDACTED]. [REDACTED] disputes [REDACTED]'s claim, and [REDACTED] provided no evidence of their work together or his contribution to the solution he turned in individually. All students accepted the academic resolution of a zero on the assignment.
Please see attached pdf (FILE NAME), documenting evidence of academic misconduct.
Briefly, [DATE REDACTED], [REDACTED] completed an online exam through BlackBoard. This exam was to be taken "closed book." The student acknowledged this in their response to the exam's first question, which gives students a chance to state they did not violate the code of conduct during the exam. [REDACTED] clicked she did not violate the code of conduct.
[REDACTED']s essay response was flagged by SafeAssign due to high similarity to other sources. My follow-up investigations of her response found online websites with high similarity (near word-for-word/paraphrased) to her submitted work.
In her response to my email notice about this issue, [REDACTED] said she wrote down notes from the website and did not use it during the test. She stated she was having a hard time on chapters 4, 5, and 6 (the exam 2 material), and started looking for resources other than the class. She also requested whether she could take another exam to show she had been studying for the class.
I noted she did not complete or attempt any of the assigned homework questions for chapters 4, 5, and 6 (which are graded and help student study for the exam). Also, I did a random sampling of my online (Kaltura) lecture view log for three of the videos for Chapters 4 and 5 and did not find her listed in the view log.
In her email response, she did not respond to either question- 1: whether she accepted responsibility for the allegation or 2: whether she accepted my resolution (zero on exam, which must be counted toward final grade).
Student contacted me to ask why no grades had been submitted into the grade-book. No grades had been entered into Blackboard because I had not received any assignments to grade. Student asked if she could submit the assignments late as they were done and could be submitted immediately. I agreed to allow submission of assignments for a reduction of points to all 3 assignments. I then checked Blackboard to see if student had been logging into Blackboard. According to the Overall Summary of User Activity the student did not login to Blackboard from 06/29-07/12, during this time period assignments were to be submitted through Blackboard. Once the video assignments were received I checked the properties tab to see when the media was created. The impromptu speech was due 06/27/2020 at 9:15 PM and the media was created 07/20/2020 at 5:46 PM, the commemorative speech was due 07/05/2020 at 11:59 PM and was created 07/17/2020 at 3:01 PM, and the cultural assignment was due 07/12/2020 at 11:59 PM and was created 07/20/2020 at 8:45 PM.
Student Conduct
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815-753-9289 (Fax)
conduct@niu.edu
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