Obu result with ACO Investigation

Hope this helps.

You are welcome. I am sure one of the Mentors on the forum will be able to assist you further.

The investigation and questions will depend on the issues identified e.g. a case where survey results have been made up, is totally different from blatant copying or even where passages that are essentially the same but word substituion via a dictionary or thesaurus to change some words has been used to try to disguise the fact. Therefore there are no stock questions and exact format to the investigation as they will be related to the individual irregularities found in the work.

The ACO officers are experienced academics who have many years of interrelating with students [so have heard every excuse under the sun during the course of their investigations]. Turnitin has been refined by its devlopers and is quite accurate in identifying the original source of the passages plagiarised [and can even identify the student and University or author and dates where it first appeared] and will show the exact words that have been substituted/ changed.

A mentor will not spot plagiarism as there are millions and millions of documents worldwide – that is the reason Turnitin is used because it contains all of those sources in its repository.

No it does not necessarily mean that, but what it means is that if a student thinks that paraphrasing just means changing a few words here and then they are mistaken. All the words they have retained from the source used will be in coloured text and all the words in the sentences that they have changed with be in black text – making it obvious that all they have done is worrd substitution. All of the coloured text will contribute to the matching score [the higher this is, the more likely the conclusion that pligiarism has taken place]

Paraphrasing is actually about expressing ideas and concepts in your own words [often by precising] and not simply just changing a few words in passages. So word substitution does not mean you have not plagiarised and if you have reproduced a lot of work this way then yes, you may be found guilty of plagiarism

According to my academic contactts at OBU there has always been an issue of unscrupulous mentors falsely telling students that the report is not important and their exams carry more weight for the degree and then they have written the RAP report for the student. This is a serious breach of the student regulatios because the RAP should be the student’s own work.

If a student has been properly mentored there will be several drafts that show how the report built up. There will be major differences in these drafts where the sttudent has genuinely written the report and the changes and structure have evolved , which somehow cannot be replicated. Where the mentor has written the report will be none of these genuine drafts that the student has written [because the mentor did the work] and attempts to do these earlier drafts are readily apparent.

It is impossible for genuine mentoring to be just a verbal process!

The investiagtion process usually only involves the student but where the mentor is implicated they have been instances where they have been banned. However students must accept that getting someone else to write your work but pasing it off as your own is fraud and therefore a criminal offence in the UK and a breach of the ethical standards required of an accountant.