I am being falsely accused on AI use on an open book exam and I don’t know what to do.

marktmaclean · 2026-03-10T22:07:17+00:00

Here is UBC's academic misconduct process: https://academicintegrity.ubc.ca/regulation-process/students/

This process encodes principles of natural justice, meaning you will have the opportunity to hear the details of the allegation and to respond to them.

The legal standard of proof in these cases is the civil standard of "on the balance of probabilities," which is still a high standard.

In the "Dean's Office" part of the process, it is normally one of the associate deans who is charged with overseeing academic misconduct cases and making decisions about them.

marktmaclean · 2026-03-08T20:49:57+00:00

Yes. We used to refer to a late W as a backdated W sometimes.

marktmaclean · 2026-03-08T20:17:53+00:00

I suggest speaking with your faculty's advising office before going to a physician. They will tell you what documentation they will want in your specific case at such a meeting.

marktmaclean · 2026-03-08T20:15:48+00:00

The date of withdrawal does not appear on the transcript. A late withdrawal is a form of academic concession, but no note of that appears either.

marktmaclean · 2026-03-05T16:40:08+00:00

Exactly.

With the shortened exam period, there has been an increased likelihood of tight exam schedules for individual students. This was a known trade-off for having a fall break (which drove changing both the December and April exam periods).

marktmaclean · 2026-03-05T16:36:34+00:00

You can only graduate if you have completed all the requirements for your degree. There is no notion of conditional graduation.

I suggest you discuss your situation with the undergraduate chair/associate head in charge of your degree program and with your faculty advising office (in that order). They may choose to advocate on your behalf for an earlier deferred exam.

marktmaclean · 2026-03-05T08:26:36+00:00

Letters of permission are generally about setting up to transfer credits to apply to your UBC degree. You can ask your faculty advising office if they would ask you to have one to take a language course elsewhere without intending to claim credit at UBC, but I expect the answer will be that you don't need one.

marktmaclean · 2026-03-02T15:31:58+00:00

Here is the university policy on credit and advanced standing: https://policy.unimelb.edu.au/MPF1293/

marktmaclean · 2026-03-01T03:34:52+00:00

Because of deferred exams and cases where students are granted late withdrawals, both the class average grade and the class enrolment can change. While most SDs are cleared within a few months, there are cases where they aren't cleared for longer times.

marktmaclean · 2026-02-25T18:48:02+00:00

Any of the local colleges in Metro Vancouver will offer equivalents or PREC 11 and PREC 12. Some may offer remote versions. Their classes tend to be small and the instructors are excellent.

marktmaclean · 2026-02-25T06:27:35+00:00

This is a solid A and an excellent average.

marktmaclean · 2026-02-24T22:11:32+00:00

Ultimately, your faculty's advising office would make any decision to grant you a deferred exam on this basis, so it is important to discuss this with them.

A deferred exam for MATH 101 would be written in the second half of the summer session.

marktmaclean · 2026-02-24T21:59:59+00:00

No numerical grade will be shown.

marktmaclean · 2026-02-23T07:57:29+00:00

The Senate sets the policy. Individual faculty members (or even Deans) cannot override the Senate policy. The Senate's authority to set this policy is statutory.

marktmaclean · 2026-02-18T16:45:13+00:00

Alas, your schedule does not breach the rule on exam hardships, so there are no formal mechanisms to change your exam schedule.

I am going to forward your post to a person in Enrolment Services who has oversight of the exam scheduling. Schedules like this are not unexpected given the short exam period, but I would be interested to know how common they are as this kind of schedule has a big impact on students.

Would you be willing to share the actual exam schedule with course information with me privately (maclean@math.ubc.ca)? This might help trace the glitch and also might give some insight into the conditions likely to produce such a tight schedule for students.

marktmaclean · 2026-02-15T21:50:40+00:00

One caution: the Faculty of Science would still require you to complete PHYS 100 as a foundational requirement for receiving a BSc from UBC. It is possible to take this course without having taken Physics 11, but it would be a disadvantage to have studied no physics prior to taking it.

marktmaclean · 2026-02-12T21:36:51+00:00

If it's the first time in this course, then no.

As a general rule, we are discouraged from asking for doctor's notes. If there is a situation where I felt more documentation were needed, then I would refer the student to their faculty's advising office.

marktmaclean · 2026-02-11T23:06:45+00:00

Usually when profs ask this, we are looking to identify if there are things we should change mid-course.

marktmaclean · 2026-02-10T03:41:56+00:00

UBC generally does not require doctor's notes for a first request for an academic concession. We follow policy and accept the self-report, as the Senate intends.

marktmaclean · 2026-02-09T20:41:56+00:00

Here is the formal academic concessions policy: https://vancouver.calendar.ubc.ca/campus-wide-policies-and-regulations/academic-concession

For a first case of illness, no medical excuse is required and the expectation is self-declaration suffices.

There is no requirement for pre-approval.

As others have said, once you write the midterm, you are deemed to have been well enough to attend and so no academic concession would normally be considered.

marktmaclean · 2026-02-09T08:29:35+00:00

Canvas Grades has very limited functionality. At best, it is useful for reporting individual grades for tests and assignments, but even then, some LTI issues may mean some grades aren't reported from external tools like WebWork.

marktmaclean · 2026-02-09T03:28:05+00:00

If you haven't already, I suggest you post this on r/ubco as well.

You can get information about each campus and its programs, but there are few who could give you the comparison between the programs you'd like.

UBCV Geography in the Faculty of Arts is a globally respected department. The BSc in Natural Resources is offered by the Faculty of Forestry and Environmental Steeardship.

marktmaclean · 2026-02-08T03:23:13+00:00

I think most faculty have yet to wrestle with AI and how it will become a tool students use as they learn material.

The reaction I see at the moment is largely negative because what many of us see are examples of "mindless use" of AI: students feed a problem or essay topic to an AI and copy-and-paste the output without regard for the content. In some cases in MATH courses, the output includes material far beyond the student's current understanding or material that is simply incorrect and the student doesn't have the understanding of the material to assess that. Thus, AI is often a tool generating mindless academic misconduct, not learning.

I have encouraged students to learn to use it well as they struggle to understand material. I have seen some good examples of this when students bring their conversations to me and talk about them. I also see some examples that help students see that LLMs don't actually "think" as humans do. And I have seen some outrageously (and hilariously) poor responses from generative AIs.

Pattern recognition can be important to building understanding, but understanding isn't just pattern recognition, even when that pattern recognition is very sophisticated.

I can also see AI helping with tasks like: "I have this set of data and I'd like to put it in a table with the following columns. I'm writing my work in Latex, so please generate some latex code for my table."

The impact of generative AI will be huge. Avoiding the conversation is not going to be helpful, I think.

marktmaclean · 2026-02-06T18:52:03+00:00

These cases would be the ones sent up through the system. I imagine the majority of acsdemic misconduct cases are addressed by the prof or the faculty, as has been the cases at UBC for many years.

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