New Plagiarism Policy

Dear students and parents,

As many of our students have moved to online learning, our teachers have found many students have turned to websites and online searches to help them with their assignments and essays.  As a result, teachers have found that many students are handing in short answers, parts of essays or full essays that were not their own.  This is an example of plagiarism and not only does it result in a lot of additional work for the teacher and the student, it is dishonest.  All of our teachers utilize online tools that help seek out copied sentences or parts of sentences and what we have found is this often links back to sites such as course hero.  Course Hero (and other sites like it) ask students to upload assignments and in return the student can access work that is put on there. 

When we address this with students, we find, for the most part, that they really don’t feel they did anything wrong (either uploading the work or taking from an online site).  Please accept this note as fair notice that if our teacher deems any of your work copied from another source, this potentially will result in achieving a 0 for that assignment.

Post secondary institutions respond to plagiarism by withdrawing the student at their expense.  We feel that it is our responsibility to teach you that copying anyone else’s ideas or thoughts or words is not okay.  We aim to teach students to always be honest about the work that they do and ensure that this work is original.  Students need to always take responsibility for their own learning.  Essentially, we expect students to have academic integrity.

Please review the GHLA Plagiarism policy and let your teacher know if you have any questions and/or concerns.

Jennifer Bertsch

Principal of Alternative Programs

Golden Hills School Division #75

(403)934- 5179 ext 7099