How Not to Respond: 5 Mistakes Professors Make After Misconduct Rulings

May 28, 2025

Academic misconduct cases can leave professors feeling frustrated, especially when outcomes don’t align with their expectations. These emotions are understandable and how faculty respond to disappointing rulings can impact their professional standing; relationships with colleagues and students; and future effectiveness in addressing misconduct.

Here are five common mistakes professors make when they disagree with academic misconduct decisions—and better approaches to consider.

1. Venting to Students About the Decision

The Mistake: Discussing the case details or expressing frustration about the ruling with other students, either in class or informal settings.

Why It Backfires: This behavior undermines institutional authority, creates an uncomfortable environment for students, and may violate confidentiality requirements. Students lose confidence in the system and may question whether they’ll receive fair treatment.

Better Approach: Process your concerns through appropriate channels. If you need to discuss the case, speak with department chairs, ombudspersons, or trusted colleagues who understand confidentiality requirements.

2. Making Public Complaints on Social Media or Forums

The Mistake: Posting about the case on social media, academic forums, or other public platforms, even when avoiding specific names.

Why It Backfires: Public complaints damage professional relationships and institutional reputation. Even anonymous posts can often be traced back to their authors. This approach also models poor conflict resolution for students and colleagues.

Better Approach: Use internal grievance procedures or professional development opportunities to address systemic concerns. Focus energy on improving processes rather than criticizing past decisions.

3. Refusing to Participate in Future Misconduct Proceedings

The Mistake: Declining to serve on academic integrity committees or refusing to report suspected misconduct because of disagreement with previous outcomes.

Why It Backfires: Withdrawal from the process eliminates your voice from future decisions and reduces the system’s effectiveness. This stance also shifts additional burden to colleagues who continue participating.

Better Approach: Stay engaged while working to improve the system. Use your experience to advocate for clearer guidelines, better training, or procedural improvements that address your concerns.

4. Treating the Student Differently in Future Interactions

The Mistake: Allowing disappointment about the ruling to affect how you interact with the student in subsequent courses, recommendations, or professional settings.

Why It Backfires: This behavior constitutes unprofessional conduct and potential retaliation. It undermines the educational mission and creates legal risks for both you and the institution.

Better Approach: Maintain professional boundaries and treat all students equitably. If you find it difficult to interact objectively with the student, consider recusing yourself from situations where bias might affect your judgment.

5. Bypassing Established Processes

The Mistake: Going directly to senior administrators, board members, or external parties without following institutional procedures for investigations, appeals, or grievances.

Why It Backfires: Skipping proper channels damages relationships with immediate supervisors and colleagues. It also reduces the likelihood that your concerns will receive serious consideration, as decision-makers prefer to see that established processes were followed.

Better Approach: Work through designated channels first. Document your concerns clearly and present them through official appeal mechanisms. If these prove insufficient, seek guidance from faculty governance bodies or professional organizations.

Moving Forward Constructively

Disagreement with academic misconduct decisions stems from genuine concern for educational standards and fairness. Channel this concern into productive action by focusing on prevention, process improvement, and professional development rather than relitigating past cases.

Consider these constructive alternatives: participate in policy review committees, mentor colleagues on documentation practices, advocate for faculty training on academic integrity, or contribute to scholarship on effective misconduct prevention.

The goal is not to eliminate disagreement with misconduct decisions—different perspectives strengthen academic integrity systems. The goal is to express disagreement in ways that improve outcomes for everyone involved while maintaining the professional standards that serve our educational mission.

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Sarah Elaine Eaton, PhD, is a Professor and Research Chair in the Werklund School of Education at the University of Calgary, Canada. Opinions are my own and do not represent those of my employer.

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Student Academic Integrity: A Handbook for Academic Staff and Teaching Assistants

June 6, 2022

In a few weeks, my secondment to the Taylor Institute of Teaching  and Learning as the Educational Leader in Residence, Academic Integrity, will draw to a close. One of the last projects to wrap up was the faculty handbook on academic integrity and I’m pleased to share it with you as an open access,
downloadable .pdf: Student Academic Integrity: A Handbook for Academic Staff and Teaching Assistants

Excerpt from the Introduction

Front cover: Student Academic Integrity Faculty Handbook

Front cover of the Student Academic Integrity Faculty Handbook, published by the Taylor Institute for Teaching and Learning at the University of Calgary

This guide is intended for academic staff at the University of Calgary, though it may also be useful to others on campus including graduate and undergraduate teaching assistants (TAs) and students.

The guide begins with background sections that provide an overview of what academic integrity is, roles and responsibilities related to academic integrity, and how to speak the language of integrity. From there, content is organized into broad chronological categories that guide you through academic integrity before the semester starts (when you are planning your courses) and during the semester (when breaches of integrity are most likely to occur), concluding with a look at the end of the semester and beyond. These are not absolute chronological categories and there can be overlap. Breaches of academic integrity (i.e., academic misconduct) can happen at any time, and these breaches can be complex. This guide is not meant to address all possible situations or outcomes, but instead to provide practical support to help you understand what you can do to promote academic integrity and what to do when a case of academic misconduct arises.

A key message woven throughout this guide is that you are not alone when it comes to promoting integrity or addressing academic misconduct. Cases of misconduct are not handled by individual academic staff members or teaching assistants at the University of Calgary. Instead, cases are
investigated and managed by designated individuals within each faculty, usually an associate dean. There are units across campus that can help you promote academic integrity, and that manage alleged or actual breaches of integrity in your classes.

Acknowledgements

I acknowledge folks by name who provided an editorial review of the content at different stages of development. Additionally, I would like to thank Brandi Dickman and Alix Redmond at the Taylor Institute who provided additional leadership and support during the production process, including copy editing,
final layout, and design.

Download a full copy of the guide here.

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Sarah Elaine Eaton, PhD, is a faculty member in the Werklund School of Education, and the Educational Leader in Residence, Academic Integrity, University of Calgary, Canada. Opinions are my own and do not represent those of the University of Calgary.

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Ghost Grading: Part 2 – Examining Possible Legal Loopholes in Canada

September 7, 2021

In Part 1 of this series I talked about how contract cheating companies are now targeting professors and teaching assistants (TAs) to offer grading services. Since then, I have done a bit of digging into whether it is legal, or even permissible to outsource one’s grading responsibilities.

I figure if you are hired to for an academic role that includes teaching that would also including taking responsibility for grading and other duties related to assessment. Of course there are provisions to work with a TA in some courses, but TAs are also employees of the university and their work is approved by the institution. In cases like this, working with a TA is a perfectly legitimate activity and there is no deception. Ghost grading is different because it can happen without the knowledge or permission of the employer.

Ghost graders are unauthorized individuals, hired under the table, to perform academic duties that would otherwise be conducted by academic staff or teaching assistants.

Employing ghost graders also deceives students because they have no idea who is assessing their work or who has access to it. Just as educators expect students to complete their assignments themselves, without engaging a third party, so too, should students be able to expect their professors and teaching assistants to assess their work. If a professor or TA hires a ghost grader, the student has no idea what that individual or company might do with their work without their knowledge, such as re-sell it or share it to the contract cheating company or any other additional third party. You can start to see how the practice of using unauthorized ghost graders gets complicated fast. By hiring a ghost grader, educators are breaking trust with their students and their employers.

University faculty members at publicly-funded universities in Canada are often unionized. To my surprise, I found several examples of collective agreements and employment contracts that do not strictly prohibit the outsourcing or sub-contracting of one’s duties. I started with my own university. I searched for the terms “outsource”, “outsourcing”, “subcontract”, and “sub-contract” in our collective agreement for academic staff. I found no matches for these search terms. I reviewed the collective agreement and it was not immediately evident to me that there was any clause that specifically prohibits faculty members from outsourcing their job duties to a third party. (Please note: I am not a lawyer or an expert in contract law.)

I found this puzzling. I am the first to admit that I am not a lawyer, and nor am I an expert on labour laws, collective agreements or contracts. So, I reached out to the University of Calgary Faculty Association (TUCFA) on August 12, 2021 via e-mail to ask for clarification regarding outsourcing in University of Calgary’s collective agreement, but yet to receive a response. To be fair, I am quite sure they remain very busy with matters related to COVID-19 and I will update this blog post if I receive a reply from them.

Out of curiosity, I repeated the search and scan with the collective agreements for academic staff at the University of Alberta (Alberta, Canada), the University of British Columbia (British Columbia, Canada), and Queen’s University (Ontario, Canada) with similar results. As a non-expert, I could find no immediate evidence in any of them that it is prohibited to outsource one’s grading responsibilities, or any other employment duties, for that matter.

I should point out that I have not conducted an in-depth investigation into this. I am situated in Canada and I cannot speak to what happens in any other country. I did not conduct a scan of the collective agreements that cover teaching assistants, but I would not be surprised if the situation was the same.

Following my first blog post on this topic, I received a number of e-mails from individuals telling me stories of professors at their university (in Canada and elsewhere) who regularly outsource their grading duties, paying for services out of their own pocket or under a research grant, classifying them as “professional services”. This is all anecdotal and I cannot substantiate any of it.

What I can say is that it seems there may be a legal loophole, at least in Canada, that would allow contract cheating companies to wiggle into this new line of business of offering grading services to professors and teaching assistants. As with student contract cheating, the companies would not be at fault, particularly since there are no laws in Canada prohibiting these kinds of companies from operating. In other jurisdictions, were laws against contract cheating have been enacted, the focus has been on academic cheating, so there may be loopholes elsewhere that legally allow companies to reach out to faculty and teaching assistants to provide sub-contracting services.

Of course, no collective agreement or employment contract can be exhaustive of all the ways that an employee can engage in misconduct. It could be that there is no clause in these agreements that strictly prohibits outsourcing of work because it falls under a general category of employee misconduct that might be addressed on a case-by-case basis, with investigators considering numerous pieces of evidence and details. It seems bizarre to me that this particular loophole exists, because it has left post-secondary institutions vulnerable to exploitation from commercial third-party providers who profit from various forms of misconduct. And if faculty and teaching assistants do not know that it is unacceptable to outsource their work, then it seems reasonable to expect that some of them might fall prey to companies who promise to ease their stress and relieve them of aspects of their work that they find unrewarding or too time-consuming.

Contract cheating companies are infiltrating higher education faster than ever before; and they may have just found a whole new market for illicit academic outsourcing services with professors and teaching assistants being their target customer base.

Read more:

Ghost Grading: Part 1 – A New Twist on Contract Cheating

Related posts:

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This blog has had over 2 million views thanks to readers like you. If you enjoyed this post, please “like” it or share it on social media. Thanks!

Sarah Elaine Eaton, PhD, is a faculty member in the Werklund School of Education, and the Educational Leader in Residence, Academic Integrity, University of Calgary, Canada.

Opinions are my own and do not represent those of the University of Calgary or anyone else.

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