Submit an Academic Petition or Appeal

Petition Letter: I, Marie Claire Rivet-Glavicic, am reaching out to appeal a recent (March 22, 2021) student disciplinary of misconduct decision made by my professor, Meghan Norris. On February 25th, 2021, a fellow classmate of mine reached out for help with our weekly Psychology assignment; he enquired about what I had written for the assignment due February 28, 2021. I had already submitted the assignment on February 24th at 11:14am. On February 25, 2021, I sent my classmate a photo of my assignment, with the understanding that it was solely to be used as a reference point and not to be copied. I did not see the harm in sharing as I had already submitted mine so it would be clear that it was my original work if he were to copy my work. I truly did not believe he would copy my work since he was a close friend of mine, and I trusted he was just going through a rough time and could use the support.
Subsequently, I received an email on March 4th, 2021 from my Psychology professor, Meghan Norris; the email informed me that I was under investigation for the previously mentioned assignment due to overlapping sources, including another students in the class. For the overlapping sources it said I had 3 of plagiarism from the site CourseHero in which I do not have an account for nor have access to. As well 5 from a student paper, in which the sentence highlighted in the Turnitin was cited and made clear was not mine.
Since I had only sent my assignment to the preciously mention fellow student, I immediately contacted him to ask about the situation; he admitted to me that he had copied my work but ¿¿not word for word¿. I asked him to contact our professor, Ms. Norris, and inform her that he had copied my work. He assured me that he would and had advised the professor of his actions; he also stated that he had contacted his football coach about the situation. I also sent my professor copies of the interaction between my peer and I, laying out how I did not intently provide my assignment for him to copy. I accepted that in hindsight I should not have shared my work with him. I did not inform her of his admission to me that he had copied because I foolishly once again trusted that he had done as he said he would.
On March 22nd, 2021, I received the email from Dr. Norris advising that the investigation was completed. The email went on to state that I was found to be in a breach of facilitation, resulting in a zero on my assignment and a Level 1 on my file. While I accept my actions on the resulting grade for my assignment, I do not feel the formal finding of a Level 1 was justified. I was unclear as to the guidelines regarding academic integrity code regarding sharing one¿¿s work; I thought that since I had submitted it already that I could share it with a peer for reference purposes only. Given that this is my first year and my first offence, I believe the sentence should fit the crime¿which was not intentional, just ignorant. I do not plan to ever share my work with anyone in the future but I feel vulnerable to the fact that not all people are honest and sincere. I am vulnerable to the possibility of someone else intentionally and fraudulently copying my work without my permission, in no way gave him permission to copy my work. I see this as a learning opportunity. Though I admit I innocently and ignorantly committed sharing my already submitted work with a peer, I did not give him permission to copy it. It is my understanding that despite him admitting to intentionally and fraudulently copying my work, he did not receive a harsher finding than I did. No matter which way you look at things, if I am guilty of a Level 1, is he not guilty of a more severe finding.
I want to state again all I was doing was trying to help out a fellow student with not intention of breaching the academic integrity. I am appealing to have the Level 1 offence taken off my file, and accept the zero percent as a learning lesson.