Universities Wimp Out on Fighting Cheaters
Loye Young has gotten some attention in the education blogosphere by trying to punish cheaters with public shame — and getting fired for it.
As a junior professor at Texas A&M, Young posted on his course blog the names of six students he caught plagiarizing papers. He had warned his students in the course syllabus that he would “promptly and publicly fail and humiliate anyone caught lying, cheating, or stealing.”
Trouble is, that’s against federal law, which forbids disclosing any student’s “educational record,” including disciplinary matters. So Young was fired.
This privacy law is not an obscure provision — at least, it’s not obscure among the teachers and administrators who are bound by it. I can testify to that from experience: when I taught in academia, how to deal with plagiarism was a regular subject of concern and conversation — and everyone knew the limits imposed by the federal privacy law.
Those conversations became very different for me the day I actually caught a student cheating and had to decide what to do about it. I’m afraid I didn’t handle it the way I should have — but more about that in a moment.
First, let’s lay down some general principles. Young should have followed the law. But obviously it doesn’t follow that the law is a good one. As Edublogger Joanne Jacobs incredulously asks, “should plagiarism be a private matter between the professor and the cheater?”
You would think that question would have gotten more attention long ago. The heart of the matter is that the system treats cheating as part of your “educational record,” making no distinction between academic records, which ought to be confidential, and disciplinary ones, which shouldn’t — because cheating undermines the integrity of the entire academic community, just as criminal punishment isn’t confidential because crime undermines the civic community.
My experience, ten years ago, is probably not unusual. I observed several students, who were foreign nationals, cheating during an exam. They had seated themselves so that the test paper of one who was well-prepared was visible to the one behind him, and others were tiered to see the first copier’s paper and thus disseminate the correct answers.
I waited until half-way through the test and then stood beside the first copier to prevent him from getting answers from the prepared student. After the test, I analyzed, by calculating probabilities, the correspondence between the papers both while copying was possible and after it was not. The results indicated that the chance of accidental pre-intervention correspondence between the papers as high as I observed was less than 1 in 10,000.
I assigned zeros for test scores of these students. The first copier, at the urging of a professor from the same foreign, petroleum-producing county, appealed the punishment to the University review panel, which was composed of eight students and one faculty member. I was required to defend my action. Only the rigorous statistical evidence of cheating, and an ability to explain probability to the panel, turned back the student’s attempt to avoid punishment for what was clearly a conspiracy to cheat.
During my appearance before the panel, I felt that I was on trial for doing my job. I retired as soon thereafter as financially practical and have never regretted that decision. Universities have become institutions where prudent faculty go-along-to-get-along. Finding prudence a burden, I got out.
Two stories about cheating and plagiarism back from College a couple of decades (plus) ago
Bio 2 was the departments “weeding” course, you know, the one for would-be majors where they got rid of the dead wood. I was getting extremely frustrated – I was running a low B average, working my butt off, and doing it honestly. The was perhaps 1/2 dozen kids running As and High Bs, and it was SO obvious that they were cheating during exams, it wasn’t funny. Then came the final – worth 60% of your grade, and the Professor totally rearranged HOW the exam was given, and basically made it impossible for the students to cheat. The cheaters flunked the exam, and when he graded the course, he curved the course slightly (he never curved any exams), and I ended up with a B+ – not great, but… The bad part was that before the finals, I had decided to drop out and go to electronics school based upon what was going on..
The other story was English Compost ion – the semester before. I can’t remember the topic of the non-fiction paper I had to write, but along I went, footnoting my paper, siting my sources, etc, and I hand my paper in. I get my grade – F – and report to the disciplinary hearing to be throw out of school for plagiarism. Huh? It seems my conclusion paragraph exactly (and I do mean exactly) matched the conclusion paragraph on a book on the exact topic of my paper! The interesting thing was I had TRIED to get a copy of that book inter library, but it was just a student PhD paper, and there were no copies available – it seems my professor had the ONLY copy available for interlibrary loan. That ended up being my defense, that I couldn’t have copied the final paragraph, as he had the only copy I could have copied FROM, with out a 500-600 mile trip to get a copy. That, and the fact that I had done proper cites throughout the rest of the paper swung the board to back me (plus the fact it wasn’t even a term paper, but a weekly homework). Classic case of the Million Monkey syndrome actually happening
One year I was obliged (due to weather and scheduling concerns) to convert a mathematics midterm exam to a take-home exam, instead of giving it in class. When I passed it out, I stipulated that the exam was to be taken under the same conditions as it would have been in class (e.g. no notes, calculator allowed) with the exception that unlimited time was allowed.
When I went to grade the exams, I discovered that one student had copied off another. This was pretty obvious because when you work a math problem, you usually write a column of work to the bottom of the available space, then break and start a new column– the copier’s column breaks were all at the same step as the copyee’s, but not at the bottom of the available space since her handwriting was smaller. Also the students were known to be study buddies and their tests were absolutely identical in every respect, down to the individual steps in the problems.
Since I was a mere temporary lecturer, I ran this situation past my assistant department head, who informed me that there was really nothing I could do about it because I hadn’t personally observed the students cheating. In other words, cheating is allowed on any take-home assignment.
I quit teaching last year.
I went to graduate school somewhat later in life and was astounded at how things had changed. I was surprised by how many were more interested in grades than learning. How fun it was a year later to watch a student who cared more about learning land a plum job and his starting salary bested everyone’s in the group, including the physicians.
I am also a recovering academic.
All of my syllabi stated plainly that plagiarism was grounds for expulsion, not only from class but from the university. Those occasions where I caught students doing it were relatively few, but enlightening. Despite requiring that I get administrative approval for each and every syllabus before printing it, the spineless life-forms at the top denied knowing that I had included a plagiarism admonition, and did this every time the matter arose. Whenever I pressed the issue I was undercut by the school’s administration, who not only altered my grades after the fact when I flunked a plagiarist, but never supported or imposed a punitive action against one of them. Not once. When a minority, disabled, or female student was involved, the university’s student services office (i.e., the PC Gauleiter) contacted me to make sure that I was sufficiently deferential to the plight of such students. This institutional discrimination rankled me a great deal. It wasn’t enough to be competent and dispassionate. One also had to moisten a finger and assess the direction of the prevailing political wind as part of the decision process, or suffer the consequences. The student’s conduct and character were never the issue; sex, race, and disability trumped all such pedestrian considerations.
The final straw was the virtually universal agreement my colleagues expressed in private, but whose public support was non-existent. The two state universities at which I taught were inhabited by gutless, unprincipled wastes of skin, top to bottom. Calling them “go-along-to-get-along” wimps is a quantum-level too kind. Higher education had deteriorated to the point that I had become ashamed to admit I was part of a hollowed-out system, which was worsening each year. Getting out was the only option if I were to remain sane.
Education will have to be completely re-worked, stem-to-stern, before it will ever again provide substance to students. Short of a revolution I can’t see that happening. The societal bill for this stupidity will be gigantic and is coming due. Our nation is in for a very, very rough time.
Die Fledermaus is correct on all points. My characterization was far too kind. To rectify that I will relate the Case of the Disappearing Pornographer. A full professor in my department had for years filled his laboratory, using state and federal funds, with comely female undergraduate assistants. Finally, his luck ran out when it was discovered that he was the publisher of a website that featured student models splayed at play. (He used his own name on the porn site. What brilliance! But then it was the early days of the internet.) In exchange for signing a letter of resignation dated several months in the future, the pornographer-professor was put on sick leave at full salary until the resignation date and offered help in finding another academic job. To keep the scandal quiet, the administrators were happy to send this cretin on to another institution with no thought for the integrity of their profession. The department head, who had been aware of at least some of the unprofessional (I know, Der F., too kind a characterization) activities, was not removed or sanctioned in any way that I was aware of.
Der Fledermaus correctly defines the system as hollowed-out and corrupt. The Chinese are going to eat this pathetically weak society’s lunch in the coming decades.
Thank you for posting this description of the reality of the Internet and academic cheating! I have been advocating the Internet as a source of knowledge for learning since 1997. The “makes cheating easier” accusation has been foisted on to the public to help to preserve the education establishment. I have posted about your essay, linking to it, in two blogs where I hope it will help get what you have written more widely read:
My GoldenSwamp.com blog:
http://www.goldenswamp.com/2008/12/03/the-internet-gives-the-edge-to-good-guys-in-academic-cheating/
Howard Rheingold’s SmartMobs.com:
http://www.smartmobs.com/2008/12/03/the-internet-gives-the-edge-to-good-guys-in-academic-cheating/
And then there’s Vice President-elect Joe Biden.
’nuff said.
About a dozen years ago, as a graduate instructor at an elite southern university, a school famous for its “single sanction” honor system, I received a paper from a student which was clearly in violation of the honor code. I turned the case over to the honor council, and there was a preliminary hearing which resulted in the student being charged with an honor offense. What happens after that is that either the student leaves the university, or, if he or she protests, there is supposed to be an honor trial. In this case the student protested, but there was never an honor trial because the student claimed that he had a “contributory mental disorder,” which was basically an attempt to use the Americans with Disabilities Act in employing a tactic similar to an insanity defense. The student’s punishment, such as it was, was some course of counseling.
While I was somewhat dismayed by what this outcome meant for the supposed sanctity of the honor system at the university, on the other hand, I was somewhat relieved that I hadn’t had to go through an honor trial. Colleagues and advisers who had had previous dealings with the honor system had actually told me not to turn the student in to the honor council, because if the case went to trial, the case could have possibly turned into an attack on me as the student’s instructor and not the examination of the evidence that it was supposed to be.
So does any of this surprise me? Not really.
While I detest any form of cheating I have one question…. who the hell cares?
College is a joke. Its not about learning its about paying huge sums of money for a piece of toilet paper that amounts to basically a letter of recommendation. Ppl are cheating more then ever along with colleges not caring because deep down both groups understand how the game is played… students pay huge sums of money they don’t just expect good grades they demand it… Colleges expect huge sums of money and understand that the product they sell is mostly worthless. They are happy to look the other way because of the money and the knowledge that its really meaningless anyway.
In the end cheating benefits both sides heavily so why both to stop it?
In Japan, there are colleges and universities where faculty are not allowed to fail students, except in cases of excessive absence. Apparently the logic is that students who fail will take their money to another college. When there are too many colleges and too few students, it might happen. Undergrad education in Japan is generally considered slack time to compensate for the rigour of high school (and possibly earlier).
I teach at a private college and… yeh – they will cheat. And the admin? Well, it’s all about retention.
The only way (IMO) is to design a test that assumes that the students will ‘help’ each other – and then tell them to pair up and go to it.
Might not be the best way to judge learning ( but who cares – it”s THEIR brain not mine ) but it eases the hassle of dealing with cheater histronics.
Bitter much? Surrendered much? Well – not MUCH!!
LOL
In the end cheating benefits both sides heavily so why both to stop it?, robotech master
because, robotec master, we’re too big to fail. 300,000,000 ignoramuses all bumping into each other running away from al queda is not a good look.
I graduated from the University of New Hampshire back in 1982. I never cheated and I did not know anyone who had, but I kept good company. Of course we heard stories, but again most of the people I knew did not approve of cheating and I also knew faculty who would never tolerate it. I have two masters’ degrees, one in Philosophy from when I was a Jesuit seminarian and then an MBA in Finance from Boston College after I had left the seminary. I did not know any fellow students who cheated and in those days it was not easy to do so, since the only electronic devices we had were financial calculators or statistical calculators. I taught a year in a Catholic high school and I never caught any of my students cheating (that was back in 1985) and I taught one year as a graduate assistant doing intro. to Philosophy courses at Loyola of Chicago (in 1986)and I did not catch anyone plagiarizing or cheating on an exam. And I was vigilant too!
I’m sure there were kids who did cheat during those days, but it would seem that cheating just exploded into all aspects of the education experience during the Nineties and later. Obviously, the institutions tolerate it. Teachers and professors who don’t like it face pressures to to make sure that they have an air tight case that can withstand a legal challenge. Perhaps the lawyers have unwittingly enabled it all? I think a lot of it goes right to parenting: their parents did not do a good job of moral education. Now, I went to Catholic schools grades 1 – 12, which went a long way towards imprinting upon my heart and mind the right way to live. It would seem that these kids don’t get that kind of moral education anymore. As a society we are a lot more “un-churched” than we were decades ago. Clearly, these kids think anything goes. Obviously many of their parents live the same philosophy.
The only way to deal with the current college program is mass shut downs and deaths of colleges… cheating is at best a minor annoyance in the end run.
I rarely support government intervention in anything however college has gotten out of control. The government should mandate certification tests in all fields and shift the focus from BS toilet paper degrees to a government approved cert with a testing system that could cost 1/10th the price. This system is currently working well in the computer field where ppl with toilet paper degrees can’t get jobs but ppl with certs can…
Also I think its sad you think that way judy… you are in fact much of the problem. Your belief that only “educated” ppl can do anything meaningful is sad. 90% of 2 years degrees are worthless and one could learn the same info in 3 months of on the job training. 50-60% of 4 year degrees are a jobs and can also be removed by 3-6 months of on the job training. College is suppose to be for very advanced very expensive fields where a person can’t just goto the library and learn it. Instead college has become a system of extra years of high school. In todays day and age of libraries and the internet we should see a massive decrease in the need and want to goto college. It is easier then ever to learn anything and everything… yet not only have colleges not heavily decreased… but just the opposite they have expanded in huge numbers.
I have yet to see any even remotely reasonable answer to the simple question… With the internet, libraries and information that is at the tips of even many of the poorest ppl in the US today, how is it that colleges can still charge outrageous prices for info that is freely and easily available to everyone.
I must be one of the fortunate few to have the administration back me up whenever I caught plagiarists.
Although I’m in Canada, I teach for a US based private university based out of Arizona in one of its Canadian campuses. I deliver classes at both the graduate and undergraduate levels.
I have failed students on papers and in courses for plagiarism. Twice I have been directly responsible for having students expelled completely. In every case the university backed me fully. Most of the plagiarism I have experienced takes place in a course I teach on ethics, a situation rich in irony I’m sure you will all agree.
What truly amazes me is that I work for an institution that lives and dies on retention. They are a profit-oriented organization and there must be huge pressure to do everything possible to retain as many student revenue streams as possible. Moreover, students literally pay course-by-course (rather than by the semester or term)so the retention issue looms large all the time.
And yet, I was always backed fully in my decisions.
My guess is that a practical decision was made to the effect that the organization gained more in terms of reputation than it lost from the students expelled or who dropped after they were caught.
Generally I agree with the sentiment that Internet technologies make it easer to catch cheaters. It’s easy enough to google the odd sentence to see if it turns up. I caught roughly 75% of the plagiarism that way. Just straight copy and paste from the first source on the google list. Let’s face it, cheaters are not the sharpest knives in the drawer, and a significant portion are dumb as posts. Frankly, I was delighted to provide them with a practical demonstration of the consequences of poor ethical choices.
I find plagiarism is costly on many levels. First, if well known and unchecked, it promotes further instances and lowers the morale of honest students.
Second, it costs me money. This really ticks me off, because when I find plagiarism I have to document it and spend time dealing with the issue. As I am paid a set amount for each course I deliver (I teach part time and am not on salary), each case of plagiarism represents a direct financial loss to me as it takes me more time to execute the course as a whole.
As I said, this ticks me off, a lot. So when I have iron clad proof (the only kind I ever offered up)of cheating, I really lower the hammer on the student involved.
But then, I have never denied being a small and petty man.
Third, it costs society at large. Think about that cost the next time you need surgery. Pleasant thought, isn’t it, that your surgeon may have cheated his or her way through med school? Or that the avionics crew for the commercial airline on which you have booked a flight cheated their way through exams?
And with that, I close.
Hawkwood
AnnieB,
You are typical of the flip, hip faculty who feel (as opposed to think) that it’s all about you. No you haven’t surrendered much, presumably because you have little to surrender. But you are at the heart of the collapse of moral authority in this society. You recognize no duty to preserve an ethical system. Laugh on. Everyone will pay for your hilarity.
part of the reason for people getting by with cheating is it will be the administrations that will catch heat, not the students. You can blame the media – and to an extent, trial lawyers – for this. They loooove sob stories and are NEVER held accountable when they are wrong. So it’s the college, not the student who did (obviously) wrong, who gets the shaft.
But, as LeighB’s example, those who follow the right, usually make out well. That’s because the cheaters are stupid and in the real world that gets you fired or indicted, and those who work hard and are honest can get the good jobs or at least keep them. It’s not always happy ever after, but I want to keep my head high knowing I earned my grade.
I guess I just went to the wrong school.
We threw a student out at 6am on the morning of Graduation. Of course that beat the heck out of 3am wake up calls. It was a bit cold then…
A far worse problem than cheating is grade inflation. In this case, they dumb down the standards so that “cheating” isnt necessary… and cheat the students.
I did my first bachelors at Rutgers in the early 80′s. Did my second the late 90′s at the U of Arizona. Thank goddess I had the first go-around to teach me how to think because my experiece the second time was worthless. The only good it did me was to get a good GPA (4.0 as a matter of fact… and that a “perfect” GPA was possible should tell you something) to get into grad school.
Students who used to get a jolt in high school and college now get it when they enter the job market and realize that in most cases, their degrees worthless… to a large extent because employers know the shenanigans that are going on.
At my university, we pass off all incidents to the Dean of Students office and file academic dishonesty charges. The university is not leaving cheating to the professor to deal with.
Hawkwood, wouldn’t you say that is prime reason for faculty to NOT pursue discipline. It requires unpaid effort on the part of the professor to pursue it. I am sure that too many professors simply find the time involved would be too burdensome.
I am not sure what the solution to that is but just my thoughts.
I’m going to take a contrarian view here, which will, I’m sure, tick off more than a few of the commentors:
Tom Lehrer had a funny, but good, observation about the real world -”Don’t shade your eyes, plagarize…. but, please to call it ‘research’”.
Not pretty, but outside the ivory tower, “research” is the norm.
The problem is not the internet (nor is it the “solution”), the problem is testing methods that depend on easily graded regurgitation. Most professors laugh condescendingly at madrassas which require unending rote memorization, but fail to recognize that demanding, essentially, paraphrasing in the age of cut and paste is equivalent.
Demand that cut and paste be documented with hyperlinks (think of them as footnotes
), demand that relationships between these be shown, demand that understanding be shown… but don’t think that because you required your students to read and THEN paraphrase that your requirement of this activity is either “teaching” or of more than minimal use in the real world.
There appears to be a typo in your article. You state that Loye Young was a professor at Texas A&M, he wasn’t. He actually taught at Texas A&M International University. These are two separate universities.
Colleges should have a mandatory workshop at the start of each school year, where cheating and other transgressions are discussed, and where it’s made clear what the consequences are for these actions. Maybe a teacher (with the help of a willing student) could play-act a scenario in which they catch a kid cheating and the kid is given maximum punishment.
In other words, I think that since it’s a growing problem, colleges and universities need to treat it as a big deal, and to give it a special focus. By making it clear that teachers are “on the lookout,” maybe at least some kids will think twice before plagiarizing.
I taught at ITT Tech for two years. I noticed that during math tests, there were quite a few sidelong looks made during tests. Rather than confront these situations, I made two different tests. The questions were almost identical but the answers were different by two orders of magnitude. I then handed out the tests to alternate students.
The people who copied answers from their neighbor had extremely poor grades. I did this twice then told the students what I had done and why. After that, I would label the tests A and B even if they were alike. No more problem. Ironicaly one student realized on the first test after five questions that his neighbors answers were wrong so he did his own work but didn’t go back to correct the first five. He got all his answers correct.
Sadly, when I attended college (briefly) this was pretty much the norm. Colleges are mostly status symbols and adult transition “training grounds” nowadays and learning is secondary, for the most part.
Higher education: a sham and a scam. I really can’t disagree with many of the writers here. It took me several years after I graduated to realize that college was about making money, not education. Get ‘em in, get ‘em out, get their money, and wish them the best was the university’s mantra.
The people making money had never darkened the doorstep of a university except for athletic contests. Some of the happiest people I have ever known were not college graduates. Now, this is not to knock a sound education, but there must be standards to gauge what one has learned. Yes, I am afraid the Chinese or Russians will eat our lunch some day.