Lawyering up for honor council case

Thank you for your input! First of all, on the student code of conduct, the definition for facilitation of academic dishonesty is "knowingly assist someone to get an unfair advantage academically". I did not know of this at all. As a matter of fact, the professor never talked to me once until this day about the situation. They have warned the plagiarizing student about this before they proceeded with the report, but neither of them cared enough to let me know.

Here is what is so weird about this case: a lab report is not an assignment of homework questions that have a right answer. Each student will have different data, different looking graphs, and thus different results, regardless how minute the differences may be. I understand that giving him access to my analysis and graphs looks suspicious, but anyone in my field of study should know that experimental results are unique to the individual, and that the instructors will check whether the results are indeed unique. I didn't give him my data in order to prevent him changing a couple of data points to create his own unique pattern. I showed him my final results so he can see (as he had explicitly asked me) how I analyzed my mistakes and successes, and what my analysis leads to, in hopes that he would adopt the method and in turn use it on his own data.

I personally do not think I facilitated, nor do other professors in the department, but I could be wrong. Maybe I am just being defensive.

I will try to contact the student legal aid office again. Maybe I just got an unresponsive case leader and I'll get someone else this time.

Once again, thank you for your input!

/r/UMD Thread Parent