University of Phoenix - charge of academic dishonesty

I recently received a letter of a charge of academic dishonesty. The school claims I allowed someone to log in to my account and complete work for me. The instructor took points from me for that week, dropping my grade from a B to a C. I have responded to the letter maintaining my innocence (I worked my butt off in this class). I asked the instructor and he said if I have no academic violations, I will receive credit for the class, getting the C as a worst case scenario. I was only taking one class with Phoenix to finish requirements for my degree with another school. They say it can take a few weeks for an ethics committee to meet. In the meantime, I ordered my transcript, as I don't really care about the difference between a C and a B -- I just want to graduate.

Anyone with experience with this? It wasn't a case of plagiarism and the instructor said he knows I worked hard during a portion of the class, but that things didn't add up in the other weeks. Just wondering if there's a chance he could be wrong and they don't give me credit for this class? Thanks in advance.

 

I have personal experience with such things but I find myself wanting to ask you if the allegations are true.

 

I understand why you'd ask the question. It is NOT true. I worked my butt off in this class -- spending hours trying to understand the material. I look forward to hearing some of your experiences.

 

You may not like this, but if a person did not do something unethical, almost never, when countering a charge of dishonesty, will someone couch things in the way that you initially did, i.e., "I worked my butt off". If they're wrongfully accused, they'll typically get angry and deny the charges. I've heard the "I worked my butt off" line from students who cheated before, most recently last semester when accusing a student of academic dishonesty who subsequently admitted to it. I'm a certified fraud examiner and in all candor, you sound like you're lying.

 

It is a strange response to use, especially more than once. I would expect to hear something like, "The allegations are not true. I completed all of the work by myself." Or, "I never had anyone sign in and complete my work for me."

 

"I worked hard during a portion of that course. . ."

 

Uhhh...

"and the instructor said he knows I worked hard during a portion of the class"

"Certified Forensic Examiner"...congrats you passed the CF exam, trying not to LOL.

rolladen, perhaps you cheated, perhaps not. Several(ish) years of interrogation experience has taught me that it is difficult to ascertain truthishness in a 10 sentence statement, without asking you to rewrite your story later, having you verbally discuss it in reverse, etc.

 

The closest situation I ever had was when I was finishing my degree at CTU. What happened was that the courses were stacked back to back. Two courses at a time, I believe they were 6 or 8 week terms. You did two back to back terms and then you got a one week break. So, basically, clusters of four classes taken together in a stream of never ending coursework. I was in the midst of one such break when I was sent away from my base for training. I was (wrongly) confident in my ability to maintain all of my coursework while traveling. What ended up happening was I got the first two or three assignments in, got excellent grades, but then couldn't turn in the rest of the assignments for the class. The result was two big, fat F's.

I got back to my base and, once the term ended, rolled right into the next term which, for me, was a retaking of these two courses. I got this fun idea; since the curriculum was canned, the assignments were exactly the same. So I just resubmitted the first three assignments. In one class, this worked fine. In the other, the professor graded me with an F and charged me with academic dishonesty. Her reason was that I submitted the same assignment twice. This, she decided, was plagiarism.

I carried on about the semester, appealing the F to the ethics committee all the way. In the end, my final grade (with the F) was a B. After the ethics committee determined that I had not, in fact. P, plagiarized myself, they scrapped the F and my grade shot up to an A-. The two prior failures are recorded on my transcript now as "R" because they were retaken with the higher, better grades posted in the following term.

This, by the way, was before CTU implemented software to detect plagiarism. I simply had the misfortune of being placed in a class with the same professor for two consecutive terms and the even greater misfortune of her being meticulous about keeping student records. It may have been a coincidence, but she was not on the faculty page the following term.

So, there's my anecdote. And it doesn't help you very much at all, I'd imagine.

If you are innocent then the idea of accepting a C in lieu of a higher grade should offend you to your very core. If you are guilty, then you got off easy. if you are innocent, then I'm sure you have a logical explanation of this login anomaly. If you are guilty, take this as a warning shot and don't do it again.

 

What was the evidence given to indicate your guilt of academic dishonesty?

 

Back when I was in high school, I had a pompous English Teacher who gave me a 70 on a paper, stating "Possible Plagiarism" because he felt that a 15 year old wasn't capable of writing as well as I did. "Teacher of the Year" right there, smh.

I didn't plagiarize of course, and at the time, to be honest, I wouldn't have even known how to do it effectively, and the internet was only a distant concept at that point so no chance there. I eventually wound up in college-level honors English which I aced, no thanks to that half-wit English Teacher from before.

I guess my point is, being wrongly accused of something happens. If you know you're in the right, no matter what the outcome is, stand on that and don't let it discourage you and negatively impact your future.

 

When I worked at an NA for-profit, we had a lot of students who couldn't even write at the middle school level. When we would all of a sudden see papers from them written at the high school or college level, we knew they were somehow cheating. However, we couldn't do anything unless we had proof. I could usually find proof of plagiarism, but it is very difficult to find proof of someone else completing your assignments unless that person is also a student and using the same information and structure for his or her own assignments.

 

Yeah, it happens at community college as well. Usually it's the guy who texts through class, barely passes the written exams, turns in homework that looks like it was written by a third grader and then, for the final project, pulls out this amazingly brilliant paper.

When I was in high school the most common form of plagiarism was not citing a source and claiming the work as your own. Today, you can jump on a number of websites and get someone to do your homework for you.

It's tough.

But with more schools using plagiarism detection software it is breaking the system down somewhat. Because many of those third party services archive the assignments submitted even at other schools. And since people who do homework for others tend to reuse assignments to sell to other people, it catches more in the net.

 

I'm not a GCFE, I'm a CFE, it's certified fraud examiner, not forensic. Of course I can't possibly tell based on one post, but none the less, he/she sounded fishy there. Sometimes highly intelligent people will trip themselves up in their own language and sound deceptive, and certainly in any event a person must be normed, there are reasons why someone might sound like they're lying when they're telling the truth.

Congrats on your interrogation experience, I've been teaching and developing courses in fraud for years, LOL all you wish.

 

I had a similar thing happen to me in my 11th grade high school English class. I was just an average student in high school, mainly because I was bored most of the time. I usually daydreamed in class while the teacher droned on (in classic Ferris Bueler's Day Off style).

Anyway, one day the teacher gave us an assignment to write a short story. I went home that night and spun a dandy little tale of adventure. Turns out, I discovered I really enjoyed creative writing. After receiving the paper back after being graded, there was a tersely-worded message on it accusing me of plagiarism with a grade of D-. Apparently, my teacher had a hard time wrapping his mind around the idea that such an average student could suddenly write so well.

Deeply offended and hurt I was.

I approached my teacher after class and asked him about the grade, assuring him that it truly was I who wrote it (entirely true). I'll never forget his response. He jerked the paper out of my hand and said "I'll fix it."

I never knew whether he changed my grade or not. I never saw the paper again.

 

My only foray into academic cheating was my sophomore year of high school. Someone handed me a cheat sheet for a test I was about to take in American History. Wasn't a friend, someone I knew just knew casually walked up to me in the hallway and handed me this sheet. Weird. I had it in my hand and I didn't know what to do. I was prepared for the test because I studied. Then I looked over at this other guy and I felt bad for him. He had the attention span of a Kardashian. He tried to try but he was barely passing. I walked over to him, told him what I had and asked if he wanted it. He readily accepted.

During the exam, my teacher stood up and walked directly to my desk. He said:

"Mr. Neuhaus, whattya think?" I had no idea what he was talking about. I asked him "About what?" He shrugged as he walked away from my desk and said "Oh, you know, anything. Life, friends, anything." He then walked directly to the other guy and asked him the same sort of question.

After the exam, the guy who had the cheat sheet got the dreaded double zero. I was nervous all weekend. On Monday I got my paper back; 99%. I also learned that the guy who handed me the answer sheet got his own double zero on that day.

I never learned what that whole thing was about. But that weekend of worry was enough to turn me off of cheating entirely.

 

Yeah, yeah, I contributed to the beat down, feel kind of foolish, managed to act like a pompous ass as well. Who cares if I'm a CFE? Doesn't mean I' m omniscient. So if the OP ever comes back, sorry. Maybe you cheated, maybe you didn't, that's your own business, but how in the world would I know one way or the other--I shouldn't have unleashed the snark.

 

Don't feel too bad, I started it off. I'll admit that in cases like this I have a strong tendency to have a "guilty until proven innocent" attitude. It's probably unrealistic to expect an answer at this point but jhp asked the best question - - - what was it that the university saw that completely convinced them that the op was cheating? It must have been compelling.

 

I've also heard of schools like Ashford University accusing students of cheating because a paper had a 5% similarity to another paper, which to me sounds like a reasonable % to lean in favor of the student considering that after thousands of papers on a specific topic there is bound to be similarities eventually, if not regularly.

Most topical essays wind up being nothing more than a lengthy, gratuitous paraphrasing of a prior work anyway, so as long as the match isn't word for word I don't see a big issue.