Op-Ed
Beating Cheating
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Agree to Disagree
Agree to Disagree
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As an over-caffeinated soccer coach in Kicking and Screaming, Will Ferrell tells his aspiring athletes, “I want you to play dirty if you have to, but don’t get caught!” Too often, we take a similar approach to cheating: if you need to copy to get by, then by all means, go ahead — but don’t get caught.
The available data on cheating at Cornell shows a steady increase in violations through the 2003-04 school year in Arts and Sciences, with a leveling off thereafter, Assistant Dean Patricia Wasyliw said. “Most cases involve Internet cutting and pasting, followed by altering of test questions [on regrades] or unauthorized copying of labs/homework,” Wasyliw wrote.
Many of the students I spoke with said that cheating was commonplace at Cornell, especially on take-home assignments like problem sets, in which students regularly shared or traded answers or wholesale copied.
“With so much pressure to get high grades, many science and engineering students have the outlook that it’s better to save time before prelims by copying homework and learning the material later themselves,” one student, who wished to remain anonymous, explained. On any given assignment, the student estimated that between 25 and 50 percent of students copy at least one problem.
The cheating problem certainly hasn’t gone unnoticed by faculty.
“Unfortunately, I believe cheating is significantly present,” Carl Franck, Director of Undergraduate Studies in the Physics department said. Cheating is “certainly an element of the physics teaching landscape for both students and teachers,” he said.
“We’ve discovered incidents of students copying from other students on
exams, laboratory assignments and homework assignments,” said Philip D. Krasicky, a senior lecturer in the Physics department. “Most recently, we found several instances of students submitting homework papers that were copied from an unauthorized source, [possibly obtained online],” he said.
The violations in the physics department raise a growing concern about “cut & paste” plagiarism from the Internet. According to the Center for Academic Integrity (CAI), 10 percent of students plagiarized from the Internet in 1999, while 40 percent admitted to doing so in 2005. As Professor Lynda Bogel, English, said, “I’m certain it’s easier to cheat, given the offerings on the Internet and the ease of not understanding the importance of attributing sources from Internet pages.”
Yet evidence suggests that students and faculty are both more likely to ignore academic integrity violations than they were in the past. The CAI’s Assessment Project surveyed 10,000 faculty, of whom 44 percent said that they “were aware of student cheating in their course in the last three years,” but never reported it to the campus authorities. 77 percent of students said that cheating from the Internet is “not a serious issue.”
Faculty members’ hesitancy to report violations might reflect an already-enormous commitment to deter cheating.
“I regret that so much staff energy is directed at anti-cheating activities such as copying exams before they are returned to students, devising separate quizzes for different sections, proctoring exams [and] devising cheat-proof homework assignments,” Franck said. “One can’t help but think that teachers would be enjoying instruction more and doing better at it if these burdens were eliminated.”
Indeed, under our current code, professors must mount evidence against a student, participate in a primary hearing, and often make a case again at an appeal. Often, an entire semester might pass before a case is resolved.
To avoid these difficulties, schools around the nation have adopted honor codes, which generally require students to sign pledges to report their own behavior, as well as that of their classmates, to authorities. Examinations are generally not proctored, but a single instance of cheating merits suspension, or even expulsion.
Despite the harshness of these systems, the weight of the evidence suggests that Cornell would see far fewer instances of cheating were it to adopt such a code.
McCabe, the founder of CAI, has found that honor codes have effectively reduced cheating on more than 60 campuses. Surveys he conducted throughout the 1990s demonstrate that “serious test cheating on campuses with honor codes is typically 1/3 to 1/2 lower than the level on campuses that do not have honor codes. The level of serious cheating on written assignments is 1/4 to 1/3 lower.”
Duke reorganized its academic code in 2000 to conform to McCabe’s Honor Code model, and by 2005, cheating had significantly dropped. 42 percent of Duke students reported unauthorized collaboration in 1995, and 45 percent in 2000, but by 2005, only 29 percent said they had cheated. Whereas schools without codes saw rates of unauthorized collaboration at 40 percent, Duke reported only 29 percent, closer to the 24 percent average of schools with honor codes.
With changes to our Campus Code of Conduct already underway, now might be the time to move to an honor code, especially since our current policy is over 30 years old. The new behavioral guidelines under consideration advocate harsher penalties for students, as well as the elimination of the “right to remain silent” — changes that closely mirror the honor code system for academic integrity.
If an honor code would significantly decrease cheating and complement our new policy governing student behavior, what’s holding us back?
For the most part, it’s the faculty and administration’s desire to deal with cheating in the classroom. According to Dean Wasyliw, we are the only campus that “sets the initial responsibility and decision-making about penalties with the faculty member,” while other schools immediately refer accused cheaters to judicial boards. At schools with honor codes, Wasyliw said that faculty were unwilling to turn over students because the penalties were “too Draconian,” yet a few years ago at the University of Virginia, where the honor code was invented 160 years ago, a physics professor turned over 100 students to the honor board.
Professors are also hesitant to create more bureaucracies. As Krasicky, the Physics lecturer, explained, “I wouldn’t want Cornell to become a policed community strapped with yet another layer of rules and regulations to follow or dread.”
Whether by adopting an honor code or through some other means, the academic culture at Cornell needs to change. Franck, who studied at the University of Virginia, remembers that “students enjoyed greater respect from their faculty than they do here.”
Prosecuting the few who are careless enough to get caught does not create effective deterrents for would-be cheaters. As Wasyliw said, “Colleges with honor codes tend to talk more about the importance of academic integrity, and put more resources into raising student awareness” — even if they do cause some kicking and screaming.
Rob Fishman is a junior in the College of Arts and Sciences. He can be contacted at rbf25@cornell.edu Agree to Disagree appears Wednesdays.
This makes no sense
We have an honor code. I sign it on every prelim.