We are a bunch of sorry cheaters. We live in a world where increased access to the Internet and the erosion of public morals combine in a brutal cocktail that amounts to a noxious potion of cheating stew. Our generation is a generation in crisis — or at least that’s what the old folks around here would have us believe.
This past February, Dean of Faculty (and all-around standup guy) Charlie Walcott declared that the University “fundamentally” has a problem of academic integrity.
“We live in a world where there has been an increasing amount of dishonesty and malfeasance of one form or another,” Walcott said.
“If you look at studies that have been done of high school students, approximately 60 percent of them report cheating. If you ask Cornell undergraduates how many of them have cheated on an examination, plagiarized on a paper, or done something of that sort, the percentage is over 30 percent,” he said.
Now, good fun is always to be had in inciting a Great Moral Panic. But is cheating today really any worse than, say, back when Charlie was an undergrad? Thanks to one of our favorite super-secret sources (of which Charlie, on his better days, is a much appreciated one), The Sun discovered a long lost study on this very question.
In 1956 — incidentally, the year Walcott received his A.B. from a certain disreputable charm school back east — The Sun published an article detailing an alarming extent of cheating at the University.
The “Academic Integrity Report,” which appeared in the May 2, 1956 edition of The Sun, said that 53.8 percent of students had seen in-classroom cheating taking place at Cornell during the previous term. 47 percent, In 1951, themselves admitted to having cheated during the fall of 1950. 40 percent said they had used cheatsheets or copied during a prelim or final exam. The study’s conclusion? “about half the student body cheats.” Far higher a number, we surmise (although, as humanities majors, we never can tell) than Walcott’s 30 percent.
There are a few things about this cheating panic that trouble us. We are worried that Walcott’s group’s focus on making it easier to punish cheaters — complete with complaints about the “red tape” involved in prosecuting academic integrity violations — is the wrong approach to fostering an undergraduate academic community based on trust and mutual understanding. Yet by the same token, we are skeptical of the usefulness of an honor code at a school as large as Cornell, and fear that such a code would encourage cheating rather than limit it.
Most of all, we wish the folks in charge of this academic integrity review thingy would stop making cheating out to be the special province of our generation. It is clear that cheating is not epidemic of the here and now but endemic of academic life since time immemorial. At least, that is, if our numbers can be trusted. This is not to excuse latter-day cheaters, but only to suggest that a change of tone is in order.
— DAW