Some of you with lives tied to the academic calendar have been done for awhile. Others may still be heading for the finish line. In either case, I'm willing to bet some of you have seen some cheating.
The term is when we deal with practical matters of the prevention and punishment of cheating. The interstitial periods between terms might be better spent thinking about the big picture. Some gestures in that direction (from the vault) after the jump.
It must be a law of nature that when past and current graduate students dine together at the end of December the conversation turns, sooner or later, to cheaters. First, of course, you discuss the head-slappingly stupid techniques cheating students employ. ("If they thought we wouldn't notice them doing that, they must think we're really stupid!") Then, you recount a sting operation or two (like planting someone next to a habitual cheater during an exam and having the plant spend the exam period writing utter nonsense -- all dutifully copied by the cheater onto her own exam). Finally, there is the wringing of hands over how the graduate students' efforts against cheaters are for nought given the policies at certain universities that, basically, don't let you do jack to the cheaters.
It's that last part that's been sticking in my craw since the cheating cheaters discussion of which I was a part on New Year's Eve.
Maybe I just lack the necessary perspective here. I am not now, nor have I ever been, a university administrator. I do not grant degrees, nor do I take in tuition money. I've just been in the trenches teaching. From my point of view, assignments and exams are tools for assessing how well my students have learned the material I have tried to teach them (and, therefore, of how effectively I've taught the material), and of how well they're reasoning about this material. Cheating, therefore, is a subversion of the communication that's supposed to tell us how well we've done with the process. What it ends up communicating, when detected (and detection is far more frequent than students seem to think it will be), is that the cheater doesn't actually care about learning the material on offer. And, I get that there are lots of things about which one may legitimately not care, but it seems like it's a good idea then not to take a course on them. Or, if one must take a course on them (as a requirement, say, for a major about which one does care), it seems like a better strategy to try to find something to care about in the material -- how is it connected to the thing I do care about, for example.
Indeed, part of what I find most offensive about cheating in my courses is that it is an attempt to appear as if one cares about the material that reveals the absence of actual effort to learn the material. Cheaters care about my course instrumentally, as a means to get a necessary requirement filled or to get a desired grade. And, they seem to think that I won't feel ill-used by their cheating.
But I'm not ranting about the students today. I'm down on systems that let cheating persist unchecked. On New Year's Eve, I heard tell of policies at three major research universities that make it next to impossible to do anything to a student you've caught cheating. One where a student isn't "caught" without multiple witnesses to the act -- one of whom has to be the professor of record for the course. (Teaching assistants, the prof always sticks around when the exam is being administered, right?). Another where professors and TAs are expressly forbidden from being in the room while students are taking exams (which leaves witnessing and reporting the cheating up to students ... who are not always so invested in taking up this responsibility). For all three of these institutions, there seems to be serious pressure from the administrative forces in the system not to impose sanctions (like suspension, or even failing grades) for even habitual cheaters. And the lack of institutional will to take a stand against cheating seems to have made some of the profs just ... give up trying to do anything about it in their own courses. (Who wants to take on the procedural nightmare involved even in administering a slap on the wrist?)
What the hell are these administrative forces thinking?
I'm sure much of their thinking is informed by legitimate concerns for the rights of the students to due process. If I were cynical, I might suggest that their thinking is also informed by the likelihood that the parents of the cheaters, the captains of industry paying upward of $40K a year for junior to get a name-brand diploma, may be inclined to call those administrative forces to lobby for junior to get a second (or third, or fourth, ...) chance. Certainly, it would be a problem if the system were set up in such a way that profs and TAs could merely allege cheating, without proving it, and thereby end a student's college career. But that's not what's happening. Rather, we seem to have a situation where habitual cheaters are not held to account at all, except for perhaps having to repeat a course.
This at universities where, occasionally, faculty members are booted for fabricating data.
My gut says the root problem here is the model of the university that the students and the administrative forces seem to have in mind. The operative assumption is that the student is a consumer and the university is providing a product. (I paid my money, whaddaya mean I don't get my degree?!) On this model, exams with the right answers are just the necessary paperwork you have to turn in to get the degree you came for. How much, really, should it matter how you got that paperwork filled out?
A better model, at least from where I sit, is one of community. While each of us has our individual interests, we have certain interests in common (like the honest exchange of information and ideas, or the creation of conditions that foster learning). This is why cheating is an abomination -- it strikes at our common interests, and makes it impossible for us to function well as a community. Administrative actions that don't recognize or address this aspect of cheating further undermine the community. When administrative forces don't get that cheating hurts the community, they reinforce the cheater's sense that the community doesn't matter.
Community may be the key to dealing with cheaters in the world of science, too. In many of the high-profile cases of fabrication, falsification, and plagiarism, it comes out that the cheater is a habitual cheater -- someone who has been cheating for some time, and who may even have been caught doing so but let go with a slap on the wrist. I've heard it said (and it seems reasonable to me) that the tendency to let scientists go with a slap on the wrist is reinforced by a lack of intermediate-level penalties for cheating; if all you have is the scientific equivalent of a death penalty, you may look for reasons to let people off. But, having been let off, sometimes repeatedly, the cheaters may start to get the message that cheating doesn't really matter all that much. Their "youthful" offenses are kept quiet, lest a promising young researcher's career be ruined.
Wouldn't it be better to bring the "youthful" offenses out into the light so the scientific community could make it clear how these kinds of behavior hurt the community and undermine the project science is trying to do? Shouldn't the community, in the process of training new scientists, take an active role in keeping these new scientists honest? Mercy comes from an understanding that people sometimes falter in their judgment; working together as a community to help members exercise good judgment seems like a better approach than leaving someone who has screwed up on his own with just the warning not to screw up again. The community ought to know about "prior bad acts", not so it can isolate the actors or consider them evil (because if that were the goal, you'd just boot them from the community on the first offense), but so the community can help the actors interact with the community in better ways and earn back the community's trust.
Truly evil actors will need to be booted, of course. But it seems reasonable that only a small proportion of cheaters are irredeemably evil. One of the strengths of community is that it can help bring you back after you've gotten off track. The trick, it seems, is understanding that you're part of a community in the first place.
OK. Now, relate this to society at large - the Savings and Loan collapse, Enron, etc. Which is cause and which is effect?
Jannet,
I can sympathize with you and many other teachers who must deal with cheating students regularly. However, I must take exception to your claim that cheating students are shielded by the university administration, while cheating teachers get the boot. In my own experience, all cheaters are shielded by the administration, as to give the impression that their university houses no cheater of any kind; a perfect learning enviroment! The worse that I had witnessed is the cheating teacher who harshly punished his cheating students. This teacher is described in my book "Scientific Misconduct and its Cover-Up: Diary of a Whistleblower." Of course, none of that justifies either the crime or the lack of punishment. Nevertheless, as cheating becomes more acceptable in politics, governance, the corporate world and the Church, you can expect to tackle even greater number of cheating students in your classroom.
Fall semester last year at U Montana. A student whom I had suspected of cheating in a previous test came to the final (Evironmental Geoscience). Seeing as how he had lower numbers going into the final than some students who dropped mid-semester, and seing as how his attendance was rare and his attitude pretty bad, he was going to fail the class unless he got the highest score on the final (and since past performance is almost always a predictor of future performance on these things, fat chance of that).
Halfway through the test I saw him cheating. Instead of confronting him right then, I snuck behind him and watched him for the rest of the test from ten feet away. He didn't pull out his notes again and I let him go knowing he'd fail the course and feeling that that would be punishment enough. (And of course, he got the lowest score of the class on the final, even with cheating!)
Most others in my department thought I should have demanded he empty his pockets right there and turn him in. I still felt that justice was done, though. He gets nothing to show for wasting his own time all semester, except a big fat F on his transcript.
What do you think?
What do you think?
FWIW, I think you missed one important factor: letting the cheat know you know he cheated. Sure, he failed anyway, but now he just thinks he didn't cheat hard enough.
I think you were right not to waste faculty/admin time on this dweeb, though, and it's not clear to me how you could have let him know he'd been caught without making a formal issue of it. Tough choice, I don't know what would be best.
I feel all y'all's pain. I caught 25% of a large class plagiarizing once - certain that the real number must have been at least 50% - and like a dumbass I was the one who went to the Dean and pleaded for leniency for them all. I've since learned better . . .
But, in response to the last comment - making students turn out their pockets is a bit of a stretch. Fourth Amendment and all that. If the student refuses, what are you going to do? And even if not, campus disciplinary issues are increasingly being seen as exercises of "due process" - you need almost as much legal authority to bring a student up on academic-honesty charges as you do to indict them on criminal charges, and some of them do actually show up with lawyers.
In the end, you have to get the goods on them yourself. In cases of plagiarism, you have to find the source text. That shuts off all further argument. (Or not . . . I had one student this term who, when confronted with the source text she had blatantly plagiarized her term paper from, simply denied persistently that the two texts were in fact identical, as they patently were. I blame it on the Republican War on Science.) For cheating on tests, you have to put controls in place ahead of time - interleave two copies of the test with different questions, monitor closely, demand they show their work, etc. It's a pain.
I'd say it's a postive feedback.
Kevin V,
I entirely understand where you are coming from. When I was teaching at the Naval Academy, I had a kid clearly cut and paste a paper. Because it was the Academy, he not only would have been kicked out, but would have had to pay the gov't back about $90k for room, board, pay,... and I knew his family didn't have that kind of cash. He was a good kid who screwed up. I failed him on the assignment and made him write a real paper, but did not report him.
The relationship between us and our students is care-based, so when they cheat it does feel like they are cheating on us. I understand where your colleagues anger comes from. There are certainly some who are arrogant gamers should be subjected to harsh reprisals, but cheating cases vary. Some are otherwise good kids who make dumb mistakes while sleep-deprived, under incredible amounts of stress, and on too much caffiene to think straight.
But then perhaps I'm just being a softy because I'm coming off a sabbatical and only have the vaguest memories of that grading thing...
If you can't formally punish suspected cheaters, why not just post the offending exerpts from their exams online, along with a seating chart, and let the world decide on their own whether or not the suspect passages are similar enough to be considered copied. Just stick a "suspicious exam results" page on your department page, and make sure that potential employers are aware of its existance.