r/gmu • u/eyedelater • 4h ago
Rant Academic Standards Nightmare
I took my last class this summer. I turned in my last assignment with an A in the class and expected everything to proceed smoothly. A couple of weeks later, I got a notice that my professor had reported me for plagiarism (a level II violation). I was shocked. I received an automated message to log in to a portal for details.
It was horrible. The portal was confusing as hell. It took me forever to get in contact with an actual person and making an appointment with the standards office was terrible. I had to use another portal to make an appointment and the link I was given initially was wrong.
To make things worse, I had a job lined up that hinged up my degree conferring when I said it would. And I was informed that it could take several months for my case to be heard. I expressed this in my Zoom appointment with someone at the standards office and was told that my case would be marked urgent and they would see to it as soon as they finished examining the cases of students who were SUPPOSED TO GRADUATE LAST SPRING. I get that plagiarism is a big issue, especially in this age of generative AI, but my own experience makes me suspect overreporting by professors is also part of the issue.
It took two months, but my case was finally considered and I was found not in violation. I thought it was finally over. That is, until my degree conferral came and my diploma was not awarded (its supposed to show up on your transcript). I contacted the degree people and was told that there was a hold on my graduation due to an academic standards violation and that I should talk to my advisor. (Mind you, I emailed my advisor and department head when I was first accused, before I could get in contact with the Standards office, explaining the timeline with my graduation and job and was told "we don't deal with that.") I looked at my account and it said that a hold had been placed on my account due to an academic standards violation and that this would expire in 2077 or something crazy like that. Luckily, getting it sorted was simple. The hold was removed within a few hours and just today I finally received my digital diploma.
You want to know what got me accused of an academic violation? I used a research study in my paper that I had used in a paper for another class. Turn It In flagged a sentence that was exactly the same in both. The sentence was one summing up the author's recommendations based on the data. Something like, "[Study author] recommends a multi-tiered approach to addressing this issue." According to Turn It In, my past paper had a 3% similarity to the one I was accused of plagiarizing. I'm honestly still baffled that my professor reported me in the first place. In the ruling, the standards office basically said, "why would the student draw a different conclusion from the same study?"
This whole ordeal was one of the most stressful experiences of my life. I've been mentally replying to those grad school ads with a "go to hell." I'm glad to finally be done with this damn school.
