Most people initially had problems because most RA is not taxable, thus, could not get the number of hours worked per week from HR, since most RA funding came in the form of lump-sum rather than pay-checks. However, there was never a requirement for a funding to be taxable, and the requirement for work experience letter is that it needs to be signed by the responsible officer or supervisor, of which academic supervisors are definitely qualified. I made it very clear on my work experience letter that my RA funding was never taxable, and always comes in the form of lump-sum, and they did not seem to raise any issues for it.
Regarding copy-pasting, the manual made it clear that one should never copy-paste directly from the HRSDC website because it would make it hard for the officers to evaluate if the applicant really performs the duties. This is true for a lot of occupations with broad duties such as, maybe, Mechanical Engineering, or Civil Engineering. For example, if you specify that you're working on refrigeration, you are not likely to also be designing aeroplanes as well.
For NOC 4012, even if most RA/TA just copy-pasted the whole job descriptions from HRDSC, I bet you they really did perform all of the duties prescribed there, especially for RA. As S_Govind has already mentioned, an RA is likely to perform experiments, literature review, data analysis, and also assisting professors in research activities (such as publishing papers, of which the profs will be co-authors, etc).
While it is still NOT advisable to just copy-paste the duties and lead statement, even if you do perform everything, they still cannot accuse you of misrepresentation or fraud if you really have committed or performed all the duties you wrote on your letters...
