Let's Put the Heat on Campus Cheats: The scandal of college cheating.

By Stephen Barr

From Reader's Digest

Declining Morals

James Karge-Taylor was astonished at the rampant cheating taking place in his jazz-history class at the University of Arizona. Students looked over each other's shoulders, devised coughing codes to communicate to friends, and flashed answers on the backs of their hands while pretending to stretch.

He once caught one student using his cell phone to send answers to a friend's pager. The code "54*2," for instance, meant the answer to question 54 was B. Karge-Taylor kicked them out of his classroom and gave both an F.

At small Morningside College in Sioux City, Iowa, philosophy professor Heather Reid discovered cheating in, of all places, her introductory ethics class. Two students turned in homework assignments that were almost identical. Reid reported the incident to the academic dean, leading to an investigation. One student was suspended and given an F for the course.

Incidents such as these are all too common. In recent years many colleges and universities have reported a surge in plagiarism, unauthorized collusion on assignments and cheating on tests.

In research conducted at 31 schools over the past decade, Rutgers University professor Donald McCabe has found that nearly 70 percent of students admit to cheating at some point during college, with over 15 percent reporting that they were, in McCabe's words, "serious, repetitive cheaters."

TermPapers.com

While this surge has been blamed on many factors, including a declining emphasis on moral values in the home and school, without question it's never been easier to cheat. With the Internet, students have access to a treasure-trove of information they can pinch without proper attribution. "There's a cowboy feeling about the Internet that the information is out there for everybody to use as they see fit," says Michele Goldfarb, director of the Office of Student Conduct at the University of Pennsylvania.

In a composition class, University of Texas instructor Sharan Daniel asked students to write an evaluative argument, which could include reviewing a contemporary film. One student chose a Bruce Willis movie.

Daniel suspected plagiarism when the paper turned in was different in style from the student's previous work. She did a search on the Internet and found the review the student had lifted in its entirety.

There are hundreds of websites, with names like schoolsucks.com and CollegeTermPapers.com, which offer ready-made essays on topics ranging from anthropology to zoology. Some sites are free, as long as you contribute a paper of your own, while others charge anything from a modest membership fee to over $100 a paper.

Students also get papers directly from their peers. As the semester-end approaches, the online message boards and chat rooms on many websites fill with requests for papers from desperate students.

The website of the Evil House of Cheat boasts 2000 daily visitors. There you can pick up tips on how to cheat on exams and read comments from people described as satisfied users, like one student who said he had raised his grade-point average from a D- to a B+ after he paid his $9.95 annual membership fee.

Many of the term-paper sites include a statement that the work is "for research only." But those disclaimers are regarded as a joke.

Excuses, Excuses

Experts say that academic cheating begins as early as middle school, and often becomes a well-honed habit by high school. A recent survey of 3100 high-achieving students by Who's Who Among American High School Students revealed that 80 percent of the nation's best and brightest admitted cheating in school, up five percent from the year before. More than half said it was "no big deal." Not surprisingly, 36 percent of the reported cheating cases at Georgetown University in Washington, D.C., were brought against freshmen during the past three academic years.

Some rationalize that it's okay to cheat if the course is not in their major but is required for graduating. Others assume it's a victimless offense. One University of Texas student, in a posting on an Internet forum on cheating, went so far as to defend it as a legitimate form of learning. "I personally don't cheat unless I learn something from it," the student wrote. "If that involves looking at one answer on a quiz, I think the person is more likely to remember that one answer since they had to resort to cheating to obtain it."

According to Rutgers's McCabe, one big reason students give for cheating is that they see their peers getting away with it. "They notice others doing it, and no one does anything to stop it," he says. "They wonder, Why should someone else get a better job or get into a better graduate school because people are not paying attention?"

McCabe queried hundreds of professors around the country and found that among those who had discovered students cheating, 40 percent never reported a single incident. "Many think it's a hassle," he says. "Some worry that the school may not back them up and they will wind up defending their accusation against the student."

At North Carolina State University, a teaching assistant told microbiology professor Jerome Perry that two students wrote answers in the margins of their tests and displayed them to each other. Perry says he discussed the case with colleagues, and everyone he talked to suggested that it was futile to file charges--he would ultimately be humiliated. He did so anyway. The students were found guilty and lost a series of appeals. One accepted the decision at this point, but the other asked the school's Board of Trustees to review the case.

To Perry's dismay, a board subcommittee overturned the verdict, claiming that the cheating charge was not adequately substantiated. Neither Perry nor the teaching assistant was asked to testify before the subcommittee.

"There is palpable cynicism on this campus among faculty regarding the merits of filing misconduct charges," Perry wrote bluntly to the board. He has since retired.

Return of Honor Codes

Savvy professors now discourage term-paper plagiarism by assigning more narrow writing topics and giving pop quizzes in class on students' research progress. And new websites promise to help educators detect plagiarized papers. Plagiarism.org, for instance, will compare a student's work with the over 100,000 documents in its database, as well as to those indexed by major Internet search engines.

While professors can police their classrooms, a growing number of colleges and universities are reverting to an old-fashioned institution--the honor code. "The student activism of the '60s created an environment of mistrust, which led to the disappearance of traditions like honor codes on many campuses," says McCabe. "Today, adopting some form of an honor code typically reflects a desire to bring a higher level of honesty and accountability to student life."

Unlike long-standing honor codes at schools such as the University of Virginia, most new "modified" honor programs do not obligate students to report incidents of academic dishonesty. But students who do observe cheating are strongly encouraged to do so.

For those who get caught cheating, the case is often resolved through a voluntary agreement. Sometimes the professor confronts the student in private and metes out a punishment if the student admits wrongdoing. In other instances, allegations are reported to a judicial board or honor council, usually composed of students and faculty. Once again, if the accused owns up, the matter is resolved with a punishment. The cases for students who deny cheating are often heard in formal proceedings, complete with evidence presented by witnesses.

At many schools, punishment for first-time violators is an F on the assignment or in the course, or some form of disciplinary probation. More egregious offenses, as well as a second or third offense, can result in suspension or expulsion.

At the University of Maryland, students caught cheating get an XF for the course on their transcript, which indicates failure due to academic dishonesty. First-time offenders can petition the school to remove the X after they complete a six-week seminar, though the F is permanent.

The reported number of cheating cases at the University of Maryland more than tripled from 60 in 1990--when the school's new code took effect--to 204 in 1998. "I'm convinced that's not due to an increase in dishonesty, but to more people willing to report cases," says Maryland's Gary Pavela, director of the Office of Judicial Programs and Student Ethical Development.

Some schools use publicity to send the message that cheating is not tolerated. The California Aggie, the student newspaper at the University of California at Davis, publishes a weekly synopsis of cases in which a student admitted cheating or was found to have cheated by the school's student-faculty honor council. "It's as well read as a police blotter," says Jeanne Wilson, the school's student judicial-affairs director.

There is, of course, no panacea. Cheating is so easy and widespread that it will always attract some students. But it need not be the epidemic it has become.

"My belief is that ten to 20 percent of students will cheat whenever they feel they can get away with it," says McCabe, "and ten to 20 percent will never cheat because of strong convictions or fear of getting caught. The battle is for the 60 to 80 percent in the middle."