I’ve been the Academic Integrity Officer for the School now for several years. Most cases we can sort within the School. Some cases, however, have to go one level up: especially repeat cases, or cases in particularly heavy-weighing modules, like entire MSc theses. The university then calls together an ad hoc panel to adjudicate on these matters. The people in these panels are drawn from the pool of Directors of Teaching and Learning and Academic Integrity officers of the various Schools. So it was a question of time before I would get the call.
I got the call now. We were a panel with Peredur the Linguist chairing, a lady from the International Student Office (maybe because the case involved an international student), an observer from Quality Assurance, a representative of the Student Union (there is always one there, unless the student under investigation specified they don’t need one), a University secretary, and me.
The procedure is that there is an open and a closed session, both on Teams. We start closed; that’s only with the panel, and not the student (defendant) or the AI officer of their School (prosecutor). We established everyone knew what’s going on, and we talked through what questions we wanted to ask. Then we went into the open session.
This open session was unusual; the student had chosen not to attend, so we couldn’t ask them questions. We could ask the person bringing the case. It wasn’t a long session.
We then went back to the closed session. And then we decided under what definition we decided this case fell, and what penalty (if any) we had to therefore apply.
From there on, the secretary would take over. It was her task to communicate the outcome to all relevant parties.
This was my debut! And only three working days later I would have the second already. You’re never bored if you work with academic integrity!
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