Academic misconduct is any action that could give you or another student an unfair advantage in an assessment. It's all about keeping your work honest and fair. The Academic Misconduct policy aims to protect the value of your qualification by making sure everyone's work is their own.
Key examples of misconduct are:
- Plagiarism: Using someone else's words or ideas without giving them credit. This includes work from other students or websites.
- Self-Plagiarism: Submitting your own work that you have already used for a previous course.
- Collusion: Working with other students on a piece of work that should be done alone and then presenting it as your own.
- Contract Cheating: Paying a service or another person to complete your assignment for you.
- Inappropriate use of AI: Using AI to create work that you submit as your own.
The policy sets out clear procedures for identifying and dealing with these issues and outlines what happens if you break the rules. If you need help understanding the policy or need support, you should contact the OCA's Assessment Team.
Plagiarism checks at formal assessment
All extended written work, like critical reviews, essays, reports and pieces of creative writing (prose, poetry and script), must be checked for plagiarism at assessment. The OCA uses a program called Turnitin to do this.
This happens for you automatically if you are a music student submitting work for assessment through OCA Learn. If you use the GDrive service to submit your work for assessment, the Assessment Team will enrol you into a one off "Plagiarism Checks" course on OCA Learn to carry out the check. You might get an automated email about this during the assessment event, but you don't need to do anything about it.
To help with these checks, all your written work must be submitted as a word-processed document in either a .pdf or .docx file format. Links to work on a blog or other online platforms cannot be used.