Academic Policies

Plagiarism

Integrity is a core value of Notre Dame academics. As a result, student work and assignments are to be authentic and original. With artificial intelligence tools increasingly at students’ disposal, this presents a heightened threat to academic integrity. According the CDSBEO’s ‘Assessment, Evaluation, and Reporting Guidelines for Secondary Teachers and Administrators’ (hereafter, AER), “Teachers will take steps to promote and encourage academic honesty in a test/exam environment.” (p. 60). To avoid the steep consequences of plagiarism, teachers will outline expectations to students ahead of summative assignments, and work collaboratively with students to ensure work is authentic. Students may be asked to work on assignments in a supervised setting, to defend their written work orally to the teacher or class, or other methods as deemed appropriate by the classroom teacher to ensure academic honesty.

            The document mentioned above outlines the steps taken to address plagiarism, which can be summarized as follows for most circumstances:

1. First Offence
   1.      Teacher will notify administration and parents
   2.       A meeting will be coordinated with the teacher, student, and member of school administration to discuss
   3.       An alternate assignment will be provided to the student at the teacher’s convenience
2. Subsequent Offences
   1.      Teacher will notify administration
   2.       Administration will speak with the student and parent/guardian
   3.      The assignment may not be graded and marked as incomplete

The complete AER document can be found below: 

Late Assignments

            Teachers will communicate clear and reasonable due dates to students for summative assignments. Each teacher will exercise their own professional judgement about how these deadlines are enforced, and endeavour to work with students (on a case-by-case basis, as required) to assist in meeting these deadlines. If a student anticipates an assignment will not be completed by the agreed-upon deadline, that student is responsible for discussing the extenuating circumstances with the respective teacher and collaboratively work out a solution. Failing this, AER states that incomplete assignments may be subject to one or more of the following:

•     A referral to lunch-time study hall to complete the assignment in a supervised setting
•     The classroom teacher will notify parents of the missing/late assignment
•     Deducting marks for late assignments, up to and including the full value of the assignment (ensuring that mark deduction will not result in a percentage mark that, in the professional judgement of the teacher, misrepresents the student’s actual achievement)

If, following the interventions listed above, the assignment remains incomplete, the teacher may elect to assign a mark based on its partial completion (if sufficient) or may have no choice but to consider the assignment incomplete and therefore a mark of zero will be issued.