Q. Can faculty adapt an article to make it easier for students to read on a test?

Under fair dealing faculty are allowed to reproduce and adapt articles for tests and examinations. This means you can abridge them or edit them to make them more clear for students.

Faculty do have to follow the conditions set out in the law, which are:

• use only short excerpts (one chapter, one article, one story, or 10% of a work)
• use legitimate works (no pirated or unlawful copies)
• cite the work (if you modify it you should state "adapted from..." or "abridged from...")

The rules are a little different if you use articles/stories from our databases. Some of our databases allow modifying under the rules above (such as Proquest, EBSCO) but some prohibit modifying content (such as Gale or ASTM). 

For more information about copyright please contact the copyright team