Week 2 Questions?

1- What is an Academic Misconduct?

It is a part or a feature of student misconduct. There are many kinds of academic misconduct but some common ones include Cheating, Plagiarism which means taking ownership or copying somebody else's work, tampering with examination scripts and class records. Other types of academic misconduct that have gained academic attention include unauthorised distribution of examination material, impersonating another student in an exam which means giving an exam for another student and falsigying clinical or laboratory reports (CQU Library).

2- How is academic misconduct identified by CQU?
"That is how the University finds out whether or not a student has done something that might be academic misconduct"

CQU processes a number of cases of academic misconduct with the help of its current system AMMS, which uses a paper based form along with a collection of Excel Spread sheets located at different campuses of CQU. The identification procedure involves:

a) Raising an incident:

This is one of the initial steps, it is when the academic misconduct is Suspected and Recognised.

b) Recording the incident:

This step involves recording the incident along with the suspects details for further action.

c) Assigning the offence level:

CQU has three Offence level's in which an offence can be measured, and the penalty is given on the intensity of the offence.

d) Deciding on the penalty:

Depending on the Level of offence committed marks are deducted, a warning is issued or in other severe cases the student is presented to the CQU exclusion committee.

e) Applying the penalty:

There are two steps in which CQU applies penalties, an official letter is sent to the student finding him guilty of an academic misconduct, and the second ongoing step involves the the assignment of the exam being suspended for the student till the outcome of the charges are decided by the University.

f) Handling appeals:

There are a number of legitimate reasons where a student can contest with the charges, and in order to do such that the student must go through a process, which invloves forms as well.

g)Generating reports:

A report is generated at the end of every CQU academic term, which includes four kinds of information, that is, total number of students convicted of an academic misconduct, the total number of offences in the three levels, and the number of offences for each courses and campuses.

The idea behind, is to use this information to generate reports which are later circulated among Selected or designated people in a paper-based format.

3- Based on your experience, what could CQU do to reduce student academic misconduct?

Educate students as much as possible, Have this informaiton printed in booklets and distribute them to students during enrollments. This information must be on the University website. Students from every faculty of the university should be presented with an academic misconduct questionaire which is compulsory, and should include an appropriate research by comparing policies and procedure of other univeristies. Students should have a forum where they can share their experiences and give thier suggestion on the academic misconduct issues. Have this information available to students in different languages for the assurance of the Univeristy that international students have understood it.