Submit an Academic Petition or Appeal

Petition Letter: Friday, November 20, 2020
To the Associate Dean,

I hope that this letter is received respectfully and well. I am writing to the board to appeal my Level 1 Academic Integrity Sanction.

While I am not appealing the finding of the professor, as I see the concern, I am appealing the sanction as I have expressed that this possible breach of academic integrity was due to my lack of understanding of the assignment. When I had a discussion with Dr. Cotechini, I expressed my concern that I did not intentionally plagiarise, which is apparent as almost every sentence in my assignment has an in-text citation, thus not intentionally stealing the information. Although this is not an excuse, I feel as though my paper is evident of my lack of understanding of the assignment instructions, due to the plethora of in-text citations. Dr. Cotechini expressed that we were not able to use module content in the assignment, nor cite the modules, and I interpreted this as not being allowed to use the module information at all, which is why I solely used external sites, but knew that I had to site each line.

Without using the module content as support for my perspective on the topic, I did not understand what was expected of me or how to synthesize the information in my own words without the use of information I learned from the module content. While Turnitin did flag this, I do not consider this plagiarism, as I explicitly cited each source, and did not intentionally use information without citing it. I have expressed that I am now aware of the Turnitin similarity feature, but I was not aware of it at the time of the submission, and I would not have submitted this assignment had I known about this functionality and seen the 54 rating.

I am thankful for the opportunity to rewrite the assignment, and I look forward to rewriting with a new understanding of how module information should be incorporated into the assignment, how I will use it to guide my research, as well as how to properly cite information. I have not only learned from this incident, but moving forward I will make sure that I completely understand what is expected of me for assignments and understand the correct way to use information for papers with the correct citation format.
I hope that through this letter, my perspective and what is expected of me moving forward is evident. I will ensure this never happens again as this has significantly impacted my mental health and performance over the past few weeks, and I have learned a lesson, unfortunately the hard way.

Thank you for your time, I hope that you can understand the circumstances of this situation and my lack of intent for this error.

Kind Regards,
Victoria Settimi