I have been charged for unauthorized coloration during the final exam and got a warning as a result, but a month later, I’ve been charged for the second academic offense because they said they find similarities in my midterm exam in the same course. Is it possible to let them combine this into one case? Because I thought the second offense need to happen after the first offence not before.
hi there,
after some digging around, i haven’t been able to find anything on how first vs second offenses are technically defined. it’s possible that your second offense doesn’t necessarily need to have occured after your first offense, it might also be based on the order of when they were noticed by the instructor and reported.
in any case i don’t think it’s common to combine multiple offenses into one case if these were two separate instances of misconduct. then again, the info i have is mostly limited to the code of conduct published on uoft’s website, and there might be other nitty gritty details i’m not familiar with.
i’d recommend reaching out to downtown legal services asap as they frequently provide help to uoft students on academic offense cases and will definitely know more about Actual Law Things™ to help you out, including the details on whether this would count as a second offense, and what you can do next.
sorry i couldn’t be of more help with the first vs second offense stuff (i do have my limits you know), but if you ever need other support on this or other things you can always reach out to your registrar too, to get one-on-one advising (also anything you share with them won’t be used against you in academic offense cases).
best of luck,
aska