How does a student's misconduct history carry across to other courses (if it does)? Is there a difference between minor and major offences?

Question

I have a general inquiry regarding the impact of past misconduct in different courses of study.

To provide an example: if a student takes a course and is removed because of poor performance (or even if they are not removed and have had a warning) could this be used against him/her in a different course in the future? Or does the code of conduct for each university specify that each course constitutes a different "chance". What about when it is not about removal, and is about academic misconduct or general behavior?

In cases where the gap between both courses is quite high (say a decade), would it be safe to presume that misconduct as (for example) a teenager could not be used without good reason in the future, or could it be waived all-together?

Answer 1

My UK university centrally tracks all academic offences, both major and minor, and I think this is pretty common. We are not allowed to release information about academic offences to employers or other universities. If the new course is at a new university, it is up to the applicant to inform the university. There may be a question on the application and the applicant must answer it truthfully. If the new course is at the same university, it depends on how well they track things, in this case, how well they tracked things in the past.

Past occurrences of academic misconduct are only used in deciding penalties for current occurrences of academic misconduct. Hopefully, a student would not commit academic misconduct again. If they did, the board may have discretion to ignore some past events if a large amount of time has elapsed. This is going to be specific to each board. Even if the board is allowed, discretion, they may not exercise it.

Answer 2

Are you talking about academic misconduct (cheating) or simply poor performance?

With respec to to cheating, policies vary from institution to institution. However, in my experience it is common in the US to have a central authority responsible for recording and reviewing cases of academic dishonesty.

For example, on my campus faculty are required to report incidents of academic dishonesty (cheating, plagiarism, forged signatures on registration documents, etc.) to the Associate Vice President for Academic affairs. Individual faculty can punish students by assignment of failing grades, up to and including failing the course. There is a formal process by which students can appeal these decisions. However, if a student has repeatedly violated the policy they can be punished further by suspension or expulsion from the institution.

A huge advantage of this approach is that if this were left up to individual instructors a student could cheat repeatedly in multiple classes and never suffer any punishment worse than a failing grade in an individual class. In the other direction, it provides students with due process if they think that a faculty member has acted improperly.

A suspension or expulsion for disciplinary reasons will typically remain on the student's transcript forever.

If you're talking about poor academic performance (low grades), that can be a very different issue.

It is certainly the case that poor academic performance in the past (having "flunked out" of a program) can affect your chances of being admitted to another program even many years later. The application process nearly always requires the student to provide transcripts from all colleges that they have attended.

In the US, a student who has "flunked out" typically can apply for readmission to the university after some period of time. Many institutions have policies that explicitly disregard academic failures (and the associated low GPA) that happened in the distant past e.g. a student who flunked out 5 years ago or more may be readmitted and start with a new GPA. However, under such policies the student's transcript will still typically show the earlier academic failure.