Teachers will instruct our students on the appropriate strategies for citing sources, writing footnotes and bibliographies. This instruction forms part of the Getting Online (GO) orientation course. Teachers will refer to the APA or MLA style guide and you will be taught age and grade appropriate proper citation and referencing techniques and given guidelines to follow for quoting and sourcing another person’s work. Should students not follow the referencing guidelines for their grade and subjects, teachers will work with students to understand how to present work that requires referencing techniques. Instruction will identify strategies to avoid plagiarism (copying the work of another individual and inferring that it is the student’s own work) . Students will learn how to reference materials borrowed from the Internet, (for example, copying and pasting text or photographs from internet sites.
Post secondary institutions take this violation very seriously and student discipline includes expulsion from the university. See this page at the University of Alberta.
Teachers use strategies to identify cheating, plagiarism, copying, or gaining access to answers for a test or assignment in a way that does not reflect the student’s own understanding of the concept. Should this behavior persist parents will be notified and consequences will be assigned by the teacher in conjunction with the school administration. A mark will be awarded when an alternative assignment or test is completed by the student. A record of the incident will be kept and repeat offences will be dealt with by the administration:
1st offence: Students at Palliser Beyond Borders receive instruction about academic integrity in our Getting Online orientation. We will follow up with the student to understand what is considered to be plagiarism and how the student can properly cite works to ensure that they are not presenting research as their own, but rather giving reference to the material by, footnotes and including materials in quotes. Message reinforced: Copying another student's’ answers, copying from the Internet are considered plagiarism and do not represent academic integrity.
2nd offence: a letter will be sent home asking for parent support to stop the behavior. Plagiarism will be reported on progress reports and becomes part of the student record.
3rd offence: student loses privileges of working with us as a self paced, home based learner. The student will be required to do the entire course on site while in the presence of a teacher at one of our four Outreach sites: Coaldale, Picture Butte, Vulcan or Calgary. If this does not prove to be satisfactory to the student, her or she will be removed from our course.
Plagiarism or cheating on an exam with result in an invalidation of the exam and an assessment of zero.
Plagiarism will be reported on the student progress report.
Alberta Education has very strict policies about cheating and plagiarism as outlined in these documents. (page 8). Students risk having their transcripts annotated with notes about the plagiarism, having their transcripts frozen so that universities are alerted to plagiarism and being denied re-writes for a year. Palliser Beyond Borders takes these offenses just as seriously.