- This topic has 115 replies, 29 voices, and was last updated 2 years ago by
.
- Posts
Hello Trephena,
Is there a way I can contact you privately through email or anywhere? I have a relevant issue to this forum with sensitive information.
Kindly let me know.
Regards.
I have an email address which is my name@opentuition.com. Please remember that I can only give general advice and I am not a personal counsellor
I am greatly worried that my research report has been withheld for further investigation by the ACO. I am not sure what is wrong and what needs to be done further. Do we have to wait longer for the ACO to come back to us?
Hello everyone
Did anyone recieve a call or email from obu regarding the deferred results yet?
Normally they have to contact you within a month of the results coming out so probably very few students have been contacted.
If P39 is your last submission opportunity they will normally extend it pending the investigating i.e. if your 10 year period covers up to November 2019 they will (subject to the actual findings of the investigations) grant you permission to submit in May 2020.
Hello Ms Trephena
My ACO has awarded a 0 penalty on my Skills and learning statement and has said that she won’t be informing UMC or ACCA. It’s also stated in the email that I can resubmit the SLS if I am eligible.
Could you please help me out with this? How do I know if I’m eligible or not? And will I have to pay the resubmission fee?Hello Ms Trephena
I received a letter from ACO stating that my research report has 13% match and SLS has 18% match to previous submissions of 2 different students. I guess this would have arisen as I had looked through some sample projects prior to commencing my project. However, I am 100% sure all the primary research work was done by me and I have gone through proper mentoring.ACO has requested to submit evidence to show all work was done by me. I am not sure how to reply in this case. Pls help me on this.
The usual way to show that a report was written by you is to provide earlier copies of it. No one writes a report without it being amended so emails to /from the mentor with the first and second drafts attached with their comments can help prove originality with the report.
This may be slightly harder to do with the SLS because no draft may exist and where it depends exactly what they allege was copied – have they sent you the Turnitin Report? If not request this. As they are no doubt relying on this report for their evidence you have the right to see it. However 18% ifor the SLS is approximately 360 words – not a lot when you think of the question titles which if used probably would account for 60 words reducing it down to 300. However it depends what the report shows (as coloured text) has been copied: if it is solid passages this is harder to defend than isolated sentences here and there in different colours.
As I say you need them to send you the report before you can comment further.
Hello Ms Trephena
My ACO has awarded a 0 penalty on my Skills and learning statement and has said that she won’t be informing UMC or ACCA. It’s also stated in the email that I can resubmit the SLS if I am eligible.
Could you please help me out with this? How do I know if I’m eligible or not? And will I have to pay the resubmission fee?Eligibility to submit:
(a) are you still within the 10 year ACCA registration period at 1 November 2019?
(b) have you submitted fewer than 3 times?
If the answer is yes to both of those you are eligible to resubmit in P39.
If part of your submission was failed (even if it is only the SLS) and you need to resubmit the full resubmission fee (GBP 380) is still payable (this is because most of the fee is for administrative costs)
Hi Trephena
Thanks for your guidance on this.
However, I did not receive the Turnitin report from the ACO. Do I have to wait till she sends it or do I request for it?
Also for the moment I have the initial drafts of the report with mentor comments, the mentor meeting minutes, the emails and whatsapp conversations with the mentor and screenshots of distribution of google forms to gather primary information. Would these evidence be sufficient?
HI Trephena
Thank you for the clarification. However, I have one more question – my ACO has not said anything about my RR, she only mentioned my SLS (which received a 0 grade after investigation). Does this mean I have to mail her or OBU to find out whether I’ve passed the RR?
Also, would I have to re-submit the PPT slides as well as part of the SLS?Hi Trephena,
I had sent an email to the ACO mentioning that I do not know the students mentioned in her letter and I requested for the Turnitin Report.
The ACO did not send me the Turnitin report. However, she had replied saying that her main concern is the nature of similarities in the SLS as there are sentences identical to the other student work and this doesn’t seem to be a coincidence (Does this mean the match in my research report is not significant?)
Then she has given the sentences that match in the SLS in the email body itself. I have looked through the similarities and noted that these were similar to the sample SLS I referred.To express the same meaning I had taken sentences from the samples and rephrased them with few additional words. This is what the ACO holds as being a match.
However, I can confirm that it was only the sentences that match but the research work for the project was done 100% by me. I have evidences of the data collection, mentoring minutes, amended reports to show as reference.
I am not sure how to respond further to the ACO in this regard. Please help me on how to respond to this.
I am replying as I was an ACO Officer for several years.
You mention ‘samples’ – do you mean the exemplars from OBU itself? If yes, you should point out that your sentences were influenced by the exemplars – although I would point out that is not an excuse for plagiarism just a means of explaining that you did not copy from the other student.
If however the ‘samples’ were provided by your mentor then this is something reputable mentors do not do i.e. share student work as it is not ethical.
Either way you should explain the background to what happened
Thanks Gillian on the clarification.
The samples are some projects taken from known people at my old workplace which I used as a guide to do the project. My mentor didn’t give me any sample project. Plus I did refer to some exemplars as well.
Will it be ok to respond to the ACO saying that I did refer some sample projects obtained from some known people at my old work place. However, my mentor didn’t give me any sample project. Then to attach evidence to show that all research was done by me?
Yes it is always better to be truthful as the outcome will usually be less severe.
The evidence that you did your work yourself is normally in the form of emails and their attachments to/from the mentor showing how the work developed.
(When I was an ACO students who had copied or not done the work themselves would come up with every excuse in the book as to why did not possess these (I heard it all computer crashes, sold the laptop., deleted the emails etc.etc. The fact is as a mentor myself I know these excuses do not stack up at all, and between them either the student or mentor would have some of these – it is beyond the bounds of credibility that there is no trace at all of the draft versions of the work).
Thanks Gillian
I do have the initial drafts of the report with mentor comments, the mentor meeting minutes, the emails and whatsapp conversations with the mentor and screenshots of distribution of google forms to gather primary information. Would these evidence be sufficient?
Yes they should be adequate if there are drafts with appropriate mentor comments and email etc. (As I said above it is only suspicious where there is little or no evidence of the existence if the drafts) Great stuff! Send it off as the sooner you supply it, the sooner the case can be concluded
Hi Gillian,
I responded to the ACO officer explaining the matches arose due to me referring sample projects. She replied saying that she has concluded that I was negligent in the academic work, with plagiarism. As it is a breach of Student Conduct regulations 4.4.1 she has imposed a penalty of fail grade for the work. She has permitted me to resubmit the same project with corrections.
I have the following doubts in relation to this,
1) Does this mean she won’t be informing this to ACCA?
2) When I am resubmitting should I change all the wordings in the research report and SLS or should I only correct the places where the similarities occurred?
3) For the resubmission should I pay the increased fee of £600 or the normal fee of £340?
Academic negligence is about the lowest penalty the ACO awards.
1. It certainly will not go any further as a first offence
2. I don’t think that you will have to do much in terms of the report, although a few amendments and a little additional material is usually not a bad idea (as long as you stick within the word count). However I would advise you to completely re-write the SLS ensuring you use your own ideas and words
3. You will pay the normal submission fee (in fact from P39 onwards this is £380)
So fairly good news on all points -which is why I always say it is normally more advantageous to own up quickly about the truth of what happened
Thanks for the clarification Gillian.
With regard to the research report I do not know which parts of it matched with other sources. As such I am not sure which part of the project I should be changing.
Do I have to request for the turnitin report from the ACO so that I can identify the places where the matches arose and change the report accordingly?
It would be helpful for you to have the Turnitin report so request this. You should then see the passages that were considered to be slightly plagiarised (negligent academic practice tends to indicate that the copying was unintentional).
Once you know which passages are similar you can then ensure these are rewritten and I would suggest that you also revise some other parts (usually there are few reports that can’t be improved somewhere). Don’t look at samples as the more original content in your work the less there is an issue with plagiarism and accidental copying).
Hi Gillian
I had requested for the Turnitin report from the ACO. However she replied that she is unable to send the full report. Instead she sent me only one page of the SLS, to indicate the matches.
In the absence of the Turnitin report I am not sure which parts of my project looked similar to others. As such do I have to completely rewrite the research report and SLS?
Hello,
Please my result was withheld and sent to ACO. Before submission i did plagarism check using writecheck and got a score of 18% for my RAP report while scanmyessay scored it as 5%. The SLS scanmyessay scored it as 2%. I am wondering what i could have being flagged for? I didn’t copy and paste and make quotes with references, anyone with ideas of what to expect so i am prepare with an immediate response.
Thanks guys
IT may be similaries with reports from you and students with the same mentor. You will just have to wait until the ACO contact you. As I have said before: innocent students have nithing to fear. As an ACO I recall a student whose SLS was 80% identical to another student’s, still protested his innocence. However as his general grammar in his report was poor but in his SLS it was perfect I decided that he couldn’t possibly have written both
- You must be logged in to reply to this topic.