Dear all,

Please remember that all work submitted for any course at the University of Oulu should be the students own work and not copied or plagiarized from others.

While students are encouraged to discuss and work together, all work submitted for any course should be the students own submission and not copied from other current or former students (in courses where students are allowed to submit joint work they are explicitly informed of this).

While students are encouraged to gather together information from non-coursework sources, they should not plagiarize other peoples work.

The University rules can be found at : http://www.oulu.fi/urkund/tiedostot/Plagiarism_or_unauthorized_citation_final.pdf

The Department follows the university rules except that we have traditionally dealt with the matter internally where possible. The departmental rules are that:

1)      Any section of text taken verbatim from any source should be put in quote marks and an appropriate citation given.

2)      Only short, appropriate quotations should be used – the rule of thumb is one sentence maximum.

3)      In most circumstances direct quotations should be avoided and all of the words used should be the students.

4)      Where the words are the students own, but the idea(s) come from another source or sources, these sources should be cited.

Where uncited plagiarism/copying is spotted by a member of staff the following should be done:

1)      The piece of work (or section as appropriate) should receive a mark of 0 and/or the piece of work (or something equivalent) should be done again. This is the choice of the course convenor.

2)      The students names and the offence should be reported to myself and Tuomo Glumoff. One or both of us will have a meeting with the student.

3)      Repeat offenders will be subject to the full university disciplinary process, which can include termination of the registration of the student by the Rector.

The department and the University of Oulu takes this matter very seriously. Students work must be their own work.

Finally, the university is putting new electronic screening systems in place (http://www.oulu.fi/urkund/index_english.html) and these may be used randomly on coursework in future.

Lloyd

Lloyd Ruddock

Professor of Protein Science

Department of Biochemistry

University of Oulu

Finland