Current Students
Contact
For all FIMS undergraduate-related inquiries, including booking appointments, please contact:
Undergraduate Student Services
fims@uwo.ca
519-661-3542
FIMS Scholastic Offenses Policy
Plagiarism
Plagiarism (the unacknowledged use of another person's work) is one of the most serious academic offences, since it involves fraud and misrepresentation. In plagiarizing, one is in effect claiming another person's words, ideas or data as one's own work and thus misrepresenting material subjected to academic evaluation. It is necessary, therefore, that plagiarism carry appropriate penalties. These are within the discretion of the Instructor in consultation with the Associate Dean, but may include a grade of zero on an assignment without the privilege of resubmitting it, or failure in a course. Students found guilty of a second offence may be expelled from the Faculty.
It is entirely the student's responsibility to be aware of the nature of plagiarism. It is not always possible to identify the sources of inspiration for one's ideas with total accuracy, but a reasonable and conscientious effort to do so is expected. Students must acknowledge each published source in an acceptable format such as MLA, APA, Chicago, by author, title, date and place of publication, and page number if: (a) they quote from it directly; (b) they paraphrase its ideas; (c) they are conscious of any influence its ideas may have had on their own work.
Every source students have consulted must be appropriately cited. If students have any doubts about documentation on an essay or within a project, they should consult the Instructor before the essay and/or project is submitted.
Collaboration
When handing in lab assignments or essays, those assignments should be the independent work of only one student, unless the Instructor has given permission to hand in a joint assignment.
When the Instructor has not given permission, students who work together and produce very similar individual assignments are guilty of inappropriate collaboration. Such collaboration may include one, or all, of the following, depending on the situation:
- plagiarism, where one student has copied the work of another student;
- facilitation of plagiarism, where one student has knowingly permitted another student to copy his/her assignment;
- contravention of the Instructor's stated expectations regarding collaboration on the assignment in question.
Recycling of Assignments
No student will be permitted to submit the same material in two different courses. If it is determined that an assignment has been recycled, a first offence will result in failure in the second course in which the student has used the assignment.
