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Investigation Support

The Academic Integrity Office provides tools and resources to assist faculty when investigating potential academic integrity violations. 

Please consult the Academic Integrity Office for additional support, such as interpreting Turnitin Similarity Scores. 

Authorship Investigate

If you suspect your student has committed Contract Cheating (i.e. someone else completed your student’s assignment on their behalf), you may request an Authorship Investigate report to be completed on your behalf.

The software uses linguistic forensics to analyze and compare the student’s current submissions to their previous submissions. Please note that all assignments being compared must have been submitted to Turnitin.

Please email all requests to AuthorshipInvestigateRequest@conestogac.on.ca and include the following information: 

  • Turnitin submission ID (this is found in the information icon within the submission)
    •  A report cannot be completed without the submission
    •  These IDs cannot be “cut and pasted.” Please ensure the IP is properly recorded.
  • Student name
  • Date of submission
  • Your name
  • Course code
     

Contract Cheating

Contract cheating is defined as "the act of a student contracting another (for pay, for trade, or a favour) to complete academic work (e.g., assignment, exam, paper, etc.)" Using a Contract Cheating service or having another person complete any academic work is strictly prohibited at Conestoga College.

If you suspect a student has contract cheated, please review the Contract Cheating Detection for Makers guide

Special thanks to the London and South East Academic Integrity Network - Contract Cheating Working Group.

Document Takedown

All course content created by a Conestoga faculty member is protected by our Copyright and Academic Integrity policies. Faculty can forward a Document Takedown Request and our support team will request document removal on their behalf. We will conduct investigations on behalf of faculty into potential misuse of any file-sharing websites and then follow up with faculty on the status of their request.

IMPORTANT: If a student completes an assignment, and it does not include any assignment descriptions/instructions, questions, or a rubric included within it, it is owned by that student. As a result, Third-Party websites will not remove that material. Therefore, we will not request student work be taken down.

If you notice or suspect an assignment or course materials are on a file-sharing site (i.e., Chegg), please forward the name of the assignment or course code. We recommend providing us any URLs to the sites. We will conduct a fulsome search and request removal of subsequent material.

Please send all requests to AcademicIntegrityTakedownRequest@conestogac.on.ca. 

IP Address Confirmation Requests

If a suspicious IP Address has accessed your student’s account, and you suspect someone else has completed an assessment on your student’s behalf, please follow the instructions on the document below to receive confirmation that the IP address is one not typically used by your student or is outside of the usual geographical location of your student.

  • Please note that IP Address confirmations require the faculty member to gather the IPs from the learning system that they are asking for confirmation on.
  • Requests for IP information that faculty cannot access will not be processed.
  • The response from the confirmation will confirm or deny that there was account compromise;this process does not confirm that any academic infractions took place.
  • No IP information will be provided beyond what can be gathered by the Faculty member.
  • Personal device or account information is not gathered for academic or learning purposes and cannot be provided.
  • IPs are not exact, and there may be incorrect information available. Please take this into account when using this as evidence in any case.

Turnitin Similarity Score

IMPORTANT: Please note that these are general guidelines, and all situations must be dealt with on a case-by-case basis. 

    1. Turnitin Similarity Report
      • The Similarity Report should be visible to students.
      • Students should have the option to submit their assignment to Turnitin multiple times and make changes up to the due date.
    2. Analyzing Similarity Reports
      • There is no ‘threshold’ similarity score is either ‘good’ or ‘bad.’ Each Similarity Report needs to be examined to understand whether a student has plagiarized and whether there is a problem. An assignment can have a high similarity score due to poor writing skills but still not be plagiarized.
      • If an attempt has been made but the APA format is incorrect – talk to the student, and try to deal with the issue in the rubric (i.e., deduct marks for poor APA formatting). In addition, you can also submit a Citing, Referencing and Paraphrasing Education, which will encourage your student to attend the Citing and reference Your Work workshop to improve these skills.
      • Please keep intentionality in mind. If a student did not cite and reference properly (or at all), but it appears there was no intention to deceive, an incident should not be filed. Instead, point students to our APA support. When appropriate, deal with the issue within the Grading Rubric.
      • Review the Interpreting the Turnitin Originality Report - Staff Guide for additional support

Reference

  • Bailey, A., & Ellam, L. (2012) Interpreting the Turnitin originality report - staff guide.https://cpb-eu-w2.wpmucdn.com/blogs.brighton.ac.uk/dist/3/215/files/2012/03/Interpreting-the-Originality-Report-staff-guide.pdf 

Plagiarism Decision Tree

IMPORTANT: Please use this resource with discretion. It does not capture all the complexities of plagiarism, and it is not a "one size fits all" framework for detecting plagiarism.

The Plagiarism Decision Tree assists faculty when reviewing student written work.

Decision Tree