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Academic Misconduct Panel

Hi,

I'm in 2nd year of University and doing an Applied Econometrics module and we were assigned a group project in which we were allowed to use other research as the basis (in fact we had to submit an already published paper to prove our project was feasible). We went through the project and used a good half dozen articles, papers etc related to our topic which we referenced as we went along.

However, we received an email earlier in the week saying we will need to attend an academic misconduct panel meeting to "clarify concerns that were raised during the marking of the assessment, and to support your understanding of academic integrity and to explore how you approached your work." The accusation itself is plagiarism. The lecturer has already confirmed to the integrity department that we went about the initial stages of the project as he expected (emailing him details, receiving feedback, adapting and then starting).

We also ran the project through a similarity checker ourselves and, while it found many similarities with the resources we referenced, there was nothing out of the ordinary. We lifted the occasional phrase from 2 articles in particular as they closely related to our chosen topic however these were also referenced. Also, it is expected that key terminology will flag as similarity and as this is a fairly technical project it probably boosted the similarity % up (I believe it ended up being 23% on a 3500 word project)

So really I'm not sure what to think. We've submitted a statement emphasising no intentional academic wrongdoing, none of us have ever been flagged for academic misconduct and the department are being quite vague on what we've actually done wrong (I.e. no specific evidence provided, they said we get this at the time of the meeting)

Realising now I've just blurted out a chopped up pile of paragraphs but I hope it's followable. Thanks for any help

Reply 1

Anonymous #1

Would also like to point out they still gave us our mark (74%) and the marker commented on our creativity and skills

Reply 2

mike23mike

Not to worry, this will be a slap on the wrist. Looks like you did not put quotes in quotation marks. Thus, even if you quote and provide the reference, you need to use quotation marks if you are lifting verbatim.