The University thoroughly and clearly explains to students what academic misconduct is, gives regular lectures to let students understand what academic misconduct is and disseminates the importance of academic honesty.
Academic misconduct can be defined as one or a combination of the following (the list is non-exhaustive list):
l plagiarizing others’ achievements, not giving credit to others’ contributions or results, fabricating false data and conclusions, cheating, collusion;
l buying or selling assignments/work;
l submitting work of their own that contains material from a source (books, articles, internet sites) without proper citation and bibliographic reference
l submitting another person’s work as their own, or giving their own work to someone else for this purpose;
l re-submitting substantially the same piece of work for more than one course;
l bribing the relevant staff in order to pass the examination;
l cheating on examination:
– looking at other exam candidates’ work/test paper;
– coping other exam candidates’ work, whispering, signaling or gesturing at other exam candidates during the examination;
– leaving answering clues on tables or walls or other facilities in the examination room before exam;
– during the examination process, there are text materials related to the test content on the table or seat, or electronic equipment that stores the relevant materials related to the test content (whether read or not);
– exchanging answer papers or passing notes to other exam candidates;
– using any kind of communication equipment during the examination (regardless of the communication content being related to the content of the examination);
– intentionally allowing other exam candidates to copy from their own answer paper or assisting other exam candidates to copy;
– exchanging or transferring examination answer papers;
– taking and stealing others' examination answer papers;
– coping books, notes or other materials prepared in advance during the examination;
– taking the opportunity to go to the toilet to steal information about the examination content from outside the examination room, or talking to others about the examination content;
– allowing somebody else to impersonate as themselves to take the examination;
– impersonating someone else to take the examination.
In 5.12 Regulations on Examination Management of Jiangxi University of Technology, there are relevant provisions on the academic misconduct behavior of courses, homework and examinations (For more details, please refer to 5.12 Regulations on Examination Management of Jiangxi University of Technology, Chapter VII Examination Discipline, Chapter VIII The Recognition and Handling of Violations and Chapter IX Procedure for Violations).
If students are found to be cheating during the examination, the invigilator will collect relevant evidence and students are required to fill in the examination record and submit to the Academic Affairs Office. If students are identified as guilty of academic misconduct, teachers can follow the Examination Management of Jiangxi University of Technology and report into their report card as "fraud" and the result of this course will be canceled. The University will issue a notice of academic misconduct events, and handle the events according to 5.11 Regulations on the Daily Management of Students of Jiangxi University of Technology (Article 33) and 5.13 Measures for the Implementation of Jiangxi University of Technology in Awarding Bachelor's Degrees to Ordinary Undergraduates (Article 4).
The academic misconduct events will be handled by the University’s Academic Affairs Office and Student Affairs Office. The University will cancel the students’ results of relevant courses and record the academic misconduct in students’ files. Academic misconduct in one course does not impact other courses the student is taking.
If academic misconduct occurs in non-exam assignments and papers, the relevant teachers will deduct the corresponding test scores after confirming with the students, which may lead to the students’ failure in the course.
The Academic Affairs Office, by reviewing students' papers, can conduct duplicate checking on CNKI (China National Knowledge Infrastructure) and provide checking reports to determine whether students have committed plagiarism or not giving credit to other’s work in their papers.
If an academic misconduct is suspected within a student’s graduation dissertation, the students’ final dissertation will be submitted to the CNKI Academic Misconduct Detection Center for testing. (CNKI, is short for China National Knowledge Infrastructure, and it is a national knowledge discovery network platform in China that provides unified search, navigation, online reading and download services of Chinese academic documents but also foreign language documents, academic dissertations, newspapers, conferences, yearbooks, reference books and other resources to people in China and abroad. The CNKI Academic Misconduct Detection Center undertakes its review by checking against its database as mentioned above.)
If the graduation dissertation that is suspected of plagiarism does not meet the relevant provisions, it will be rejected and dealt with accordingly. If the plagiarism ratio of the graduation dissertation is higher than 20%, the dissertation will be marked as Fail and the student will be unable to obtain the degree certificate that year and the student’s graduation will be postponed to another year. The student will have to retake the dissertation writing course and go through the dissertation defense in the following year with the next cohort of students.
If the academic misconduct occurs during the exam, the grades will be directly canceled and the students need to retake the courses, which may lead to the students’ failure to obtain the degree certificate. If a student does not admit to academic misconduct, the student may file a complaint with the registrar to Academic Affairs Office.
The complaints, which include “whether there was fraud in the examination, plagiarism or fraud in the writing of the thesis,” are reviewed by the Academic Affairs Office of the University.
In order to ensure the fairness of the appeal process, the Academic Affairs Office can access the surveillance video of the examination to determine whether the student has cheated in the examination.
