A sharp rise in cheating cases brought before the Standing Committee on the Academic Code has caused the committee's chairs to question whether the statistic reflects a trend in cheating on campus.
Thirty cases of cheating that occurred during the Fall 2006 semester have come before the code committee, said committee co-chair and Associate Professor of Community Health Catherine Dube - seven more than were reported for the entire 2005-06 academic year. All of last semester's cases were first offenses and all but one case involved undergraduates. The committee's annual report described last year's figure - 23 cases of cheating for the academic year - as roughly average.
But professors on the code committee and Associate Dean of the College Karen Krahulik, who also serves as case administrator for the code committee, differed over whether the spike in academic code violations indicates a rise in cheating.
Krahulik said it is almost impossible to draw conclusions about whether more students are actually cheating. "If we just go by the number of cases, we can get a sense of how many are caught, but it doesn't tell us how many are cheating, and nothing will," she said.
Several factors could have contributed to the increase, Krahulik said. "It could be that the dean's office has done more outreach both to students and to faculty, and so faculty are more alert and students are more alert to each other."
Dube agreed that last semester's statistic does not necessarily mean that cheating is on the rise. "My gut impression is that it's not," she said. Dube said she thinks faculty are "activated" and in turn are reporting more cases.
But the committee's other co-chair, Associate Professor of Sociology Gregory Elliott, disagreed. Though "it's impossible to tell exactly," he said his "sociological take" leads him to believe that more students are cheating.
"There are more people trying to succeed in a society in which the number of slots available for success is not getting any bigger," Elliott said. "So that increases the pressure tremendously."
"Good people can do very bad things if the circumstances facilitate it," he said.
Even if there is escalating competition among students, Dube said she doubts it generates cheating. Cheaters make up "a very small subset of students," Dube said, noting that "the vast majority" are "academically honest and have a lot of integrity."
The current system for dealing with academic code violations is "working pretty well the way it is," Dube said, adding that there are no concrete plans to change the existing policy, despite the large number of code violations last semester. But the committee has discussed new methods for detecting cheating and also including students in code hearings.
One detection system, a software program called Turnitin.com, allows professors to submit students' essays to a database that compares them with works from the Internet, journals, periodicals and previously submitted student work. "I think it's probably just a matter of time before most universities will have something like it available to instructors to check papers for plagiarism," Dube said.
The Department of Computer Science already uses a service called Measure of Software Unity to detect cheating. The department consistently reports the most academic code violations.
Associate Professor of Computer Science Thomas Doeppner said cheating cases within the department rose proportionally last semester, "but we certainly have better means for catching people."
Doeppner said there are often issues about the extent to which collaboration is allowed. One freshman student who wished to remain anonymous said several of her professors often assign take-home quizzes that students submit online, making it "very easy to collaborate."
"In one of my classes, it's explicitly stated that we're not supposed to work with other people, but everyone kind of does," she said. "If not, people still use their notes, and there's no way for them to know if we used our notes or not."
Krahulik said efforts to make students aware of academic policies are "thorough." First-years attend a lecture about the academic code during orientation and receive a copy of the handbook containing the code. Current freshmen had to complete an online tutorial the summer before beginning classes and other students were required to sign a card agreeing to the terms of the code.
Still, given the recent rise in the number of cases, Elliott said the University could do more to address cheating. "Just telling (students) they're not supposed to cheat isn't enough," he said.
"The problem isn't one of detection. The problem is dealing with the anxiety that makes desperate people do stupid things," Elliott said. "If it continues and we find a similar number of increased violations this semester and again next fall, then I'd start to get very nervous."
