Apparently large research universities are a foreign planet on the academic honesty front. At my undergraduate institution, a tiny liberal arts school that's basically engaged in a love affair with its honor code, the process was fairly simple when someone got caught cheating: hearing in front of the Honor Council, typically guilty verdict, leading to a likely semester-long suspension, at least. It seems that schools like UT just don't have the time or patience to deal with all the instances of lying, cheating undergraduates that crop up when you have 50,000 students. The stories I've heard from my TA friends of students caught in the process of blatant, shameless cheating on tests getting passes from professors and administration are astonishing. Frequently, the punishment seems to be a meeting with the Dean, where if you apologize, you're let off the hook. Really? What is this teaching students? Pull a couple fake tears out of your ass and everything's okay? (Academic) honesty doesn't matter in the first place?
Lately, there's been a lot of coverage in the local news about an adjunct professor who was recently fired at Texas A&M for publishing in his blog the names of six students who plagerized an assignment for his class. His syllabus provided a warning that this result was possible, stating, ""No form of dishonesty is acceptable. I will promptly and publicly fail and humiliate anyone caught lying, cheating, or stealing. That includes academic dishonesty, copyright violations, software piracy, or any other form of dishonesty." Upon the publication of the names, one student went to the administration, and the professor was fired for a breach of the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act.
Now, this professor's method probably wasn't the best or most mature way of dealing with cheaters. But what do you do with students who seem to have no respect for the system? I can imagine that as a professor, watching students unapologetically cheat and get away with it one semester after another, you might reach a level of frustration that would cause you to seek any new solutions you could think of. Thoughts, dear readers?
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2 comments:
You can find the same disregard for academic dishonesty at UT Dallas. I've heard tales from the management and science end of the quad that say that cheating not only works, but it's even been encouraged. This attitude then spills over into other departments, and in humanities, it a huge problem. Many students have no problem buying an essay. For example, one class section turned in their first and last essay for the introductory humanities class (2-3 page) and there is one that was with certainty purchased online. What's worse is that the paper didn't address the questions posed in the essay prompt, and so the paper got a bad grade anyway. This shows there is no excuse for cheating. It's quite sad when a student can't even put any effort into their own education.
At LTU, there is an academic honesty code that must be on any and every assignment. Cheating is dealt with by a guaranteed failure in the class, among other things. Purdue didn't have the honor code, but they had a similar punishment. Currently, LTU runs all student papers/essays through a program called SafeAssign. This program compares your paper to all other papers in its database, and does various internet searches using your essay text. Any matches are highlighted, and I believe it also provides a similarity score that is supposed to measure how close your paper is to others. Part of me is very wary of an academic panopticon, but I can see the justifications in our highly networked world.
In larger institutions, it may take a lot of effort to gather definitive evidence of cheating on every student that you catch, and there may be a feeling that you need such proof to administer stiff penalties in our lawsuit-happy society. From a large University standpoint, it doesn't particularly hurt their bottom line if a business major turns in a copied lit 101 essay, but it really matters if one of their Master's or PhD researchers fudges their data. So, from a purely business standpoint (which can't be entirely discounted), your return on investment for harsh treatment of undergrads isn't particularly good. It might even be fairly bad; that business major might donate a fair amount to the alumni association when they graduate.
As for our society's opinion on cheating, just take a look at the financial crisis we're in. The people in charge of these financial institutions created the situation we're all in now to further their own personal gain, and the bottom line of their companies, without regard to the consequences. Now that they've gotten into the mess, they're pulling down government bailouts, then jumping ship with their golden parachutes. They are not being held accountable for their actions.
Damn kids these days.
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