On Wednesday, 6th February 2019, the Ashesi Judicial Committee (AJC) adjudicated on two cases of plagiarism. 

The AJC concluded that the students, members of the Class of 2021, were guilty of plagiarism, after finding that a portion of their papers was from another source and referenced improperly. While there has not been any record of informal resolution of the students, the cases were escalated to AJC due to the high percentage of their similarity index (above 20%) from Turnitin.

As stated in Ashesi’s student handbook:

“Academic dishonesty includes plagiarism, unauthorized exchange of information or use of material during an examination, unauthorized transfer of information or completed work among students, use of the same paper in more than one course, unauthorized collaboration on assignments, and other unethical behavior.  Disciplinary action will be taken against of academic dishonesty” (Section 7.4)

After deliberating, the AJC arrived at the following sanction:

These students will receive a failing grade for the course, August – December 2018.

Advice to the Ashesi Community:

The AJC encourages the community to remember that careless work and a lack of academic integrity will have serious repercussions. The AJC would like to further remind the Ashesi community of the following:

• Students should be responsible and plan to submit assignments/projects ahead of time and not rush to meet a deadline.
• Students should learn to do proper citation/referencing right from the onset of the assignment to avoid sloppy referencing on submission. 
• Students should make use of Ashesi resources such as the Writing Centre when their work needs to be reviewed.
• Students, when working on papers, should always make sure the document for submission is consistently saving, and should also save multiple versions at various stages of their work (e.g. Final_Paper_Draft1, Final_Paper_Draft2, Final_Paper_FinalDraft etc).

 We trust that this case will serve as a learning experience for our community. Academic honesty is very important at Ashesi and is central to our mission: To train a new generation of ethical and entrepreneurial leaders in Africa; to cultivate within our students the critical thinking skills, concerns for others and courage it will take to transform a continent.