Work being considered for Academic Integrity case?

In my experience cases like this usually come about if you have Copt and pasted large amounts of info, or if your 'original' paper turns out closely to another via a service like TurnItIn. Did you use TurnItIn or a similar service?

Worst case scenario is that they withdraw you from the course but given the info here, I would say that isn't too likely. What is usually more likely that students guilty of an AI issue severe enough to require a meeting is a mark of 0 and comoletion of an AI course.

Another possibility is allowing a resit capped at the pass mark (usually 40). Unfortunately we cannot tell you more because you yourself do not seem to know much about it. You will know more after the meeting, but in my experience, students are usually made aware of the specifics of the allegation prior to the meeting taking place.

Are you sure that have not said more?

Thank you for your reply.

I haven't copied any information directly, but I did paraphrase and added footnotes and made sure everything was present in the bibliography. The only times I copied directly was to put in quotes (which also included references) or photos. And yes they used Turnitin.

I haven't been told which parts were the issue, and they have not said any more than the fact that the uni will be sending me an email "soon". I'm genuinely very scared.

I totally understand why you are worried.

If things are as you say they are then it doesn't look like there is much of a case to answer, and you will be able to give a good account of yourself. It might be worth contacting your student union and explaining things to them. Unfortunately, the help we can give on here is quite limited.

But in the meantime try not to get too caught up in the stress of it all. It might even be a mistake.

Can you see a copy of the TurnItIn report? That is often helpful

How would it be recommended to go about when explaining my side of the story? If I tell them "I'm unaware of what similarities are present within my work as I did not write with the intention of plagiarising, and made sure that everything was referenced as far as I know." would that be too wishy washy?

I can see a copy of the TurnitIn report, I cannot see the similarity report though, only feedbacks throughout the essay claiming that I needed to be more careful with the footnotes, so I'm guessing that's their main concern.

I'm just going to assume the worst case scenario: if the meeting deems my work as unfit for grading, would they fail me from this paper? I've seen answers ranging from being let off with a warning to getting expelled. Will it have an affect on whether I will be able to graduate?
I doubt they would let me off even if it was an 'unintentional plagiarism'. I seriously don't know where I went wrong with the paper for them to investigate it ..

Thank you once again for your reply!

It is unlikely they let you off scot free, unfortunately. They might fail it, or they might allow a resit with a capped maximum mark. It annoys me when places do not let you see the similarity report, there's no harm letting you see the percentage!

Being expelled is technically possible but I think it is really unlikely. I've only seen it a handful of times, and never for referencing mistakes, only for deliberate deceit with essay Mills or copued-and-pasted essays on multiple occasions. I do not think you need to worry about that at least

It does sound like it is a footnote problem. I'm not sure how to advise you further because you don't yourself have much information to go on. It's a tough one

It's been a while since your last reply but I would just like to update you on what has happened as you helped a lot (thank you:-))

They have finally set me up for a meeting in 2 weeks, I've been told that this is simply an investigation and there is a chance that everything might have been "unintentional" as they said...
I had a look at my similarity report which was 23%, I have no idea if this is considered as outrageously high, because I've had other friends around 30-35% and were fine.
Most of it came from articles that I have already cited, as well as another research paper which I used quotes from (I used quotation marks and footnotes)... other than that it was just a lot of overlapping key terminologies that you can find almost everywhere regarding this specific essay topic... I guess I should just be more careful with my citation in the future to avoid something like this happening again.

It's been a while since your last reply but I would just like to update you on what has happened as you helped a lot (thank you:-))

They have finally set me up for a meeting in 2 weeks, I've been told that this is simply an investigation and there is a chance that everything might have been "unintentional" as they said...
I had a look at my similarity report which was 23%, I have no idea if this is considered as outrageously high, because I've had other friends around 30-35% and were fine.
Most of it came from articles that I have already cited, as well as another research paper which I used quotes from (I used quotation marks and footnotes)... other than that it was just a lot of overlapping key terminologies that you can find almost everywhere regarding this specific essay topic... I guess I should just be more careful with my citation in the future to avoid something like this happening again.