Privacy & confidentiality
Working with members of the public
Inappropriate behaviour
User disputes
Take-home exams
Suspected plagiarism
Privacy & confidentiality
Tutors will not share personal information about any student, including their use or non-use of the WriteAway service, without express permission from the student. Tutors have an obligation to protect personal information to which they have access through the WriteAway platform, as per applicable policy at their university, college or institute and the WriteAway Privacy and Confidentiality Agreement.
Working with members of the public
This service is for undergraduate students from member post-secondary institutions rather than for members of the public.
Inappropriate behaviour
Tutors have the right to refuse service if the user behaviour is inappropriate.
User disputes
Please refer any disputes with students to the WriteAway Coordinator.
Instructions for tutors
Tutors should aim to provide opportunities for the student to develop better writing skills rather than focusing simply on a better paper.
Tutors should give feedback as informed readers, suggest strategies to improve writing skills and help students become aware of errors they can fix themselves.
Tutors are not permitted to restructure or add content, rewrite parts of a student’s paper, or copy edit because the tutoring goal is not to create a perfect paper but to help the student learn to do the work of revision and editing.
Tutors are not to provide opinions about what mark a paper might get; only the instructor has this role.
Take-home exams
WriteAway tutors will not assist with take-home exams.
Suspected plagiarism
WriteAway tutors are not to pass judgment on cases of suspected plagiarism. Tutors
must not:
- Accuse students of deliberate plagiarism
- Submit student papers to any plagiarism-detection service such as Turnitin.com
- Discuss suspected plagiarism with representatives of the student’s school or the student’s instructor. Such discussions would violate student-tutor confidentiality.
Tutors should use cases of suspected plagiarism as opportunities to help students learn, and provide information about proper attribution and citation style and explain to students why citation is important.
