Allow me to tell you a little story about a friend of mine, Miss Z (I would use X but it just seems too banal). Miss Z was taking two courses with the same three-letter designator. With a stroke of pure luck, both courses required the students to complete rather similar assignments. In addition, the professors in each class knew this to be the case.

To make a long story short, Missy Zee (if you say Zed you’re out of luck) used a couple of the same paragraphs in both of the essays. Remember, it was all her own work. When it came time to retrieve one of the papers, instead of her essay, Miss Z received a thin envelope. Inside, was a short letter telling her to be in her professor’s office within an hour. I was shocked! Excuse me, Miss Z was shocked! At the office, she was faced with the professor, the head of the department, and another authoritative figure whose job seemed to be to look stern. She was told that there was reason to believe that she had committed an academic offence by submitting parts of the same work for two different courses.

Two months and three hundred migraines later, Miss Z sought legal advice and subsequently went for a formal meeting at the Dean’s office. Miss Z maintained her innocence and ignorance of U of T’s academic policies and within an hour, the case was resolved and it was agreed that the essay would be reread and marked under the pretence that those couple of paragraphs were never there to begin with. Essentially that means that the essay grade would be brought down.

Miss Z was happy to have the incident over with, but was naturally upset that this had to happen in the first place. The moral of the story is that U of T students should not be naïve in thinking that academic offences are limited to cheating on an exam or using unreferenced material-there are other offences apparently. So go home and read the “Code of Behavior on Academic Matters.” To put this in to perspective, the same thing happened to three other students in the class, so this is clearly a common misunderstanding. It’s not that I am completely daft…Miss Z I mean.

(Please contact Miss Z for detailed versions of the “Code of Behavior” and “Academic Honesty” that she now has in her possession.)