Why Cheaters Should Be Reported

I get cheating on assignments almost every single semester that I TA or teach a class (this is at a bit top-10 university, fwiw). It is always disappointing to see two near-identical papers/homeworks/lab reports/whatever. I always report.

In one memorable case, I had about 7 students (out of 120 or so) turn in suspiciously similar bits of one assignment. These were printouts of mouse-drawn circuit diagrams. Some of the assignments were identical copies of each other. Others were different in parts, but then had a few little bits here and there that were identical (e.g. identical pixel coordinates for a handful of gates). Some of the students were top-notch too. Very disappointing. Course, it was a false alarm -- the first student we confronted pointed out a built-in layout tool in the software we were using. It would take two similar circuits, and layout all the gates and wires in a predictable pattern. No plagiarism at all...

Count me as one who has had cheating cases pretty much every year I've been teaching, which amounts to 4 years in a row. I always attempt to follow through on the procedure.

One big reason I've found is simply overpacked classrooms. I used to teach a modern physics class where students filled every seat in a 40-seat room. I get the impression that the ability to just peek over at a neighbor can tempt students who would otherwise be honest.

In my classes that are computer-heavy (statistics, finite math, others) I've taken to giving large tests in two portions: 60% of the test is take-home, with the remainder given in class on the due date of the first portion. I have received take-home portions that are essentially copies - in some cases, exact duplicates - of the take-home portion, but even when some tests might be only similar, requiring them to produce under pressure on the in-class portion trips them up. However, I do have relatively small classes - mid 20s - and I can do this, and occasionally give two versions of the in-class part, so I'm in a rare position.

When I've caught folks who cheated, I've given 0s on the test, and have received great support from my chair. Guess I'm lucky there too.

It is a Good Idea to have a fair procedure in place for this, with Due Process for the accused.

As a long-serving member of the Academic Honesty Committee at Woodbury University, we had many adjudications of MBA students, who defended their plagiarisms, caught red-handed, by correctly observing that they were destined for the corporate world, where this was routine. Our default answer was: "Yes, but you are NOT in the corporate world. This is a University, and you signed the Academic Honesty Policy documents when you registered."

I tentatively conclude that Corporate Globalization is significantly increasing the quantity and proportion of plagiarism.

Or, as students become more obese, pound for pound, plagiarism is roughly constant.

Once when I suspected there would be cheating in a maths test, I made up two versions of the test differing in minor details (e.g. 33 versus 88) and handed them out alternately without telling the students. One student answered three questions that were on her neighbour's paper. I've also had a false alarm when two students had the same unexpected misunderstanding of what should be done.

With assignments it's harder. I have no problems with them helping each other, in fact I think it's part of the learning process. For the maths, if I get identical wrong work handed in I usually make some comment to let them know I've noticed but let it pass. The marks are already very low in these cases and the students in question virtually always either drop out or do abysmally in the final exam.

For biology/science, where they are expected to produce individual work, if I get ones who hand in near-identical pieces I divide the mark evenly between the number of students involved. I only ever have to do that once.

Richard Simons #5:

For biology/science, where they are expected to produce individual work, if I get ones who hand in near-identical pieces I divide the mark evenly between the number of students involved. I only ever have to do that once.

I was really impressed when I heard of one teacher's approach: he would tell the two students concerned that it's clearly one piece of work, and then ask them how they would like the marks divided between them!

Oh, that's such a delicious tactic, beautifully ironic, and it puts the students on the spot! And if it's a helper/helpee situation, really puts the onus on the helpee not to punish someone who helped him.

I actually have some guilty sympathy with helpers here - I made that mistake about ten years ago on a course - "oh stuff it, I can't debug your code, and I don't have time to give you more indirect hints, look at what I did and maybe you'll see how the problem should be approached" - only to find my version copied and cosmetically edited to look different - but only different enough to be a tacit admission of guilt. Yes, it was wrong, yes, I should have known better, but I did my first courses in the 1970s and we weren't so fussed then, and I really didn't quite "get it".

The first time I found students cheating I reported it to the Dean, according to college procedure. It became their word against mine, and my word wasn't enough (despite identical scan-trons - including the same errors and the fact they were sitting next to one another).

Even though that incident made me somewhat cynical, I still report students. Most of the time they are really mortified to have been caught - I catch at least one each year, usually on lab reports.

I served on a committee that investigated possible cheating cases as an undergrad, and I can vouch for the necessity of following a protocol. While we had many students who threatened to call their lawyers or sue upon hearing a verdict, the only case that gained any traction involved a perceived breach of the protocol that was set out. Even though the committee was able to show that it had followed the correct procedures, the headaches from having lawyers involved warranted a second look at making sure all suspected cheating cases were treated the same. In this case, a General Counsel for the college wound up closely examining the rules set out for suspected cheaters, and I think the overall result was a more streamlined process.

Cheating has its place in academia. Putin obtained his doctorate by submitting a PhD thesis that was ghost-written AND plagiarized at the same time. You can't do much better than Vladimir Vladimirovich.

The only clear instance of cheating I saw as a TA involved recorded grades for assignments. At the end of the term, one student came and asked me what I had recorded for his marks on the ten assignments. I looked up his record, and told him that he had only handed in the first four assignments, so he had zeroes for the last six. He objected, saying he had those assignments with my corrections on them, and he produced them. As I had already submitted the marks, I took everything in hand and went to talk to the teacher about correcting the records. Halfway there, I started wondering how I could manage to miss recording one particular student's marks on six separate occasions, and took another look at the assignments.

This student had borrowed six assignments from a classmate, erased the classmate's name, and written in his own. The classmate he chose, though, wrote the most recognizable assignments in the entire class. This was one of those students who copies out the entire question in pen, along with diagrams, before presenting a solution in pencil below it, and whose penmanship rivals a typewriter's. By the time I got to the professor's office, I had the details figured out, and the offending student really had no way to deny his attempt. Marks were reduced, records were kept, warnings were passed to other professors.

The 10 homework assignments together represented 10% of the final grade. The student was getting middle-of-the-class grades. 6% wouldn't be a big deal. While one might not generally offer advice on how better to cheat, this student could have done with some direction on this matter, involving both the choice of when to attempt it and how to go about it.

When I was teaching at Clemson, I had a rather horrific incident of cheating in my class. I was teaching physical chemistry, and since the problems tend to be fairly involved, I favored having at least some part of the exams be take-home so that time was less of an issue. The students had to turn in a signed statement asserting that the work they turned in was entirely their own, and that they understood the penalty for cheating was an F in the course. That didn't seem to stop about a third of the class one year (just under 10 students, I believe) from turning in exams with one problem (and only one problem) that had the same very weird mistake in it. I'm still angry about it, and it's been five years now since then.

Clemson has an interesting policy about cheating. The professor doesn't confront the students directly, but instead turns over the evidence to the Dean in charge of such things. The Dean brought the students in, and I was eventually sent mail telling me that all of the students had admitted their guilt. I have to admit that I was surprised that they admitted it. (I found out later than these students had gotten together the night before the exam was due to work on the last problem. Sadly, all of the students could have taken a 0 on that problem without it materially impacting their grades. Even more sad, one of those students, the one who'd been solicited for help, was one of my best students that year.) I was also surprised by how many of those students were extremely angry with me that I actually failed them in the course. I had one student's mother call me and try to convince me that her son's cheating was a cultural issue, and that he didn't understand the honor pledge that he'd signed. Several students complained that the F would cause them to lose scholarships or otherwise ruin their lives. Indeed, I know that was the case for some of them, because they were in ROTC, and I quickly got a call from the Army asking me to confirm what had happened. I got the impression that the US Army takes that sort of thing seriously, and that the students involved lost a lot because of it.

What on earth were they thinking?!

This reminds me of an incident. My colleague showed me two nearly identical lab reports. He was trying to figure out who copied who. I said "or..they both copied off the internet". I was mostly correct. One of them copied off of wikipedia and the other copied the first student.

I'd like to add one more reason for following procedures to the ones already given: Fairness to the students who didn't cheat. This is especially true if the class is a large class, where the marks are curved, since then increased marks for cheaters directly decreases the marks for everyone else. Even in classes without a curve, it cheapens the achievement of those who didn't cheat and hurts the reputation of the school (since you end up with students graduating who don't know the material).

Several students complained that the F would cause them to lose scholarships or otherwise ruin their lives. Indeed, I know that was the case for some of them, because they were in ROTC, and I quickly got a call from the Army asking me to confirm what had happened. I got the impression that the US Army takes that sort of thing seriously, and that the students involved lost a lot because of it.

What on earth were they thinking?!

That the punishment would only be a 0 on the assignment, not a 0 in the whole course. Presumably.

dont turn cheaters in let them crash in there own falure