First-Year Writing Program

These guidelines are for final draft essays. For information on how to talk to students who have problems at the draft stage, please see “Draft Stage Issues” below.

1. Don’t accuse your student or discuss the paper in question with her/him/them.
2. Send the following information and files to your appropriate FWP contact.
   • The student’s email address, CWID, and phone number (if available on mybama)
   • Your course and section #
   • Explanation of what you’ve found and any pertinent info about the student’s participation (drafts not turned in, conferences attended or not, etc.)
   • Copy of paper in question, highlighted and labeled to correspond with evidence (this can be the Turnitin report)
   • Copy of supporting evidence (usually copies of webpages or a matching student paper), highlighted to correspond to paper in question.
   • Course syllabus including policies and class calendar
   • Assignment sheet
3. A FWP administrator will review your materials and submit them via the A&S online form (new as of fall 2021)

The FWP encourages teachers to use Turnitin at the draft stage so that teachers and students can have a conversation about any problems with source usage. If a student paper seems problematic at the draft stage, you can offer advice on how to correct source usage problems. Don’t accuse the student of plagiarism or academic misconduct, but explain how the draft does not meet assignment guidelines and how important it is to use source correctly to avoid plagiarism in a final draft. Provide additional instruction about correctly citing sources and developing original ideas. Contact the associate director or the director of FWP for advice on talking to students with problematic drafts.

While you and FWP admin are reviewing the case, if the student asks about the paper, you may say only that you have some questions about or problems with grading the paper and you have asked someone else in the department to look at it. After the case has been turned over to the dean’s office, use the following statement if students ask about papers under review:

“I have submitted your paper to the dean’s office for review, and they will be contacting you to set up a meeting. While the dean’s office reviews this assignment, I cannot discuss the paper with you, so please wait for contact from the dean’s office.”

You may also print out the above language if you need to return papers to your class while a paper is being reviewed by the dean’s office.

Please don’t give students this notice until the FWP  has notified you that your paper has been submitted.

• Students found guilty of academic misconduct are not allowed to withdraw from the class.
• If you have a pending plagiarism case at midterm or the end of the semester when grades are due, that student’s grade will need to be reported as “I.”

• Suspected plagiarism cases in 200-level (or above) courses are turned in via the online reporting form which can be found on the A&S Guidelines page.
• See this annotated version of the online form for more info on submitting for 200-level and above