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These behaviors or actions often mean a student is preventing their own learning. This can lead to it being picked up on by Turnitin.Academic Misconduct is behavior and/or action by a student that interferes with education or fair evaluation of a student’s performance or work. Online programs that offer help with writing style and grammar can also be problematic, as work that you input may be stored on the company’s servers.
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ACADEMIC INTEGRITY DEFINITION FULL
Using this software will have implications for the quality of the work, as while it may be able to suggest a paraphrase for a sentence, it will not understand the full context of the information.įinally, as with contract cheating, work that uses this type of software will have a far higher chance of being picked up on Turnitin, as it will always interpret source material in the same way. By using software to do this, a student is skipping the valuable process of explaining that helps embed understanding. This is because lecturers need to see that a student understands the material, and can explain it in their own words. In most subjects, the majority of sources should be paraphrased rather than quoted. It might seem tempting to get a little help with paraphrasing from software that seems to do it automatically, though again, this can be considered deliberate academic misconduct and should be avoided. Time Higher Education: Six Reasons not to Use Essay Mills
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What’s more, the essay mill writers will often reuse work from previous essays on similar subjects, meaning there is a high chance of the assignment being picked up by Turnitin.Ĭontract Cheating companies are often unscrupulous too not only do they fail to give refunds, but there have also been cases where students have received threatening emails from contract cheating companies, demanding extra payments for them not to tell a university that the essay was bought.įor more about the dangers of using essay mills, watch the interview with Professor Michael Draper further down the page, or have a look at the following article: Studies have shown over 60% of ‘commissioned essays’ are correctly identified by lecturers, as the person writing the essay will not have had access to the same lectures and materials as the student.
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While a student considering commissioning work, including contract cheating, might assume there is little chance of them being caught, in fact the reverse is true. I mplications for this kind of ‘contract’ cheating are severe, and the standard penalty for commissioning work is cancellation of all module marks across the level of study and withdrawal from the university. It goes without saying that this counts as academic misconduct: the work is not the student’s own and therefore the student has not gone through the required process of research and expression of ideas that facilitates learning. These work by charging students to write essays. In recent years the market for ‘essay mills’ has grown at a rapid rate. Commissioning work is when a student arranges for another person to produce a piece of work for them. Regardless of whether or not this work is then submitted as though it were their own work, and regardless of whether or not the student pays for the work with money or with a good or service - any arrangement for another person to produce work for you is deemed a commision.
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