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Melisa is in the international commerce and policy program at George Mason University. Her language skills especially for academic discourse are still improving. She dedicates a lot of time each week to her major course on Global Political Economy and her English language support course on Graduate Communication in the Disciplines. She feels confident about the academic environment at Mason and her understating of U.S. academic culture as she was an exchange student in a language program for one semester at UCLA when she was an undergraduate student.

Her previous experience in the United States is what helped her make a decision about studying for a graduate degree. She was very attracted to the program in international commerce and policy as her future goal is to be an economics officer for her home government or with an international organization such as the World Bank. Melisa is a very enthusiastic student having never missed a class, actively engaged on campus, and even meeting with her professors during office hours from time to time.   

She has three important projects due the final week of this semester. The projects are: (1) a research paper, (2) an academic digital portfolio, and (3) a research poster for an international poster symposium. At midterms she earned a cumulative 3.2 GPA and aims to increase to a 3.5 or above for the final grades. Although she had previously performed well with competing priorities and deadlines, her stress has increased as it gets closer to the end of the semester.

Melisa decided that she will give the most attention to her research paper. However, she also came up with a list of tasks and weekly calendars to complete her other assignments by the deadline. As a way for her to manage stress and time, she asked a student who is a year ahead of her, John, if he would share his digital portfolio with her. She thought this was an effective approach because her professor had provided examples of other student portfolios on Blackboard.

John agrees to help her. He is very busy preparing for final exams, so he gave his sign-in credentials (i.e., username and password) for his Blackboard account to Melisa. He expected that she would download his portfolio assignment with feedback from the professor and then could use it as an example to create her own portfolio. John also thought this would be a way to show Melisa that he liked her. When Melisa was on John’s Blackboard account, she did get a copy of his portfolio and feedback, but she noticed that he also had completed the major course on Global Political Economy in the previous semester. Melisa was curious if the final research paper was the same. After looking through his assignments for this course, she figured out that the instructions had not changed and he had earned an A on the paper. Therefore, she went ahead and downloaded a copy of his research paper too.

She attempts to put his final research paper into her own words. In fact, she re-writes more than half of it. However, when her professor receives the paper, SafeAssign indicates that 30% matches with John’s paper. Her professor refers the situation to the Office of Academic Integrity without informing Melisa and John.

RESPONSE QUESTIONS

1.     Honor Code: Explain why the student(s) might have violated standards of academic integrity. Giving specific reference to the Honor Code, which aspects should be considered?

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