On What grounds can I make an appeal for the substitution of my Academic Award certificate? My dissertation has been refused to be marked because of 5% similarity to another students work.
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8Please remember that this is a website frequented by people from all over the world. Your question is one step removed from "How long will it take me to walk home from here?" That is: (i) by no means have you provided us enough information to answer your question; and (ii) your question is the kind of question that the people who are geographically proximate to you are much better equipped to answer than a worldwide internet audience. This is a question about the rules of your university. People who don't know your university are not qualified to answer.– Pete L. ClarkOct 8, 2015 at 4:58
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The name of my University is Oxford Brookes University.– F EneoOct 8, 2015 at 6:24
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I have not even submitted my final copy of work. I only submitted a draft to my supervisor who is meant to check and tell me what issues he is having with my dissertation. I looked at the piece of work being copied from, entirely a different subject matter from mine, though same population study which I added 5 more centres to mine adding up to 15 and the other students work was just 10 centres– F EneoOct 8, 2015 at 6:35
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1 Answer
My dissertation has been refused to be marked because of 5% similarity to another students work.
The key question is whether there was any actual copying:
If you copied 5% of your dissertation or allowed someone to copy yours, then that's a serious academic honesty issue. Whether there's anything you can do to fix it may depend on the circumstances, and you'll have to ask your advisor.
If the other student copied from you without your knowledge or permission, then I hope you'll be able to prove it (but that might be difficult).
If there was no copying, then you need to discuss this issue in detail with your advisor and try to convince him/her that the "5% similarity" figure is misleading. It may be that a plagiarism detecting program gave a misleading result, but there's no way to say without looking at the evidence in detail.
answered Oct 8, 2015 at 5:03
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1It's not uncommon for IThenticate (one widely used piece of software) to report 5% similarity for perfectly innocent cases of similar text. For example, I've seen it flag phrases like "Without loss of generality we can assume" that are common mathematical boilerplate and technical terms like "Travelling Salesman's Problem". If the only reason for rejecting the dissertation is a report of similarity at this level, then I'd say that they're not using the software responsibly. On the other hand, if there is actual plagiarism, that's a different matter. Oct 8, 2015 at 5:07
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I have not even submitted my final copy of work. I only submitted a draft to my supervisor who is meant to check and tell me what issues he is having with my dissertation. I looked at the piece of work being copied from, entirely a different subject matter from mine, though same population study which I added 5 more centres to mine adding up to 15 and the other students work was just 10 centres– F EneoOct 8, 2015 at 6:46
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@FEneo then you are in case 3. Find out who you can talk with about this; blindly trusting numbers from automatic plagiarism checkers is a bad idea.– DavidmhOct 8, 2015 at 8:22
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The committee has advised me that I have the right to appeal. Now, on what grounds can I do this?– F EneoOct 8, 2015 at 8:27
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