Light Penalties for Cheating

Does Emory not have any policies governing the institution’s response to plagiarism and cheating? I agree that it’s not the professor’s job to punish such infractions beyond giving a zero for the assignment. A grade is not a reflection of a student’s moral worth. However, the university itself should have clear policies outlining the consequences of cheating and those policies should be executed consistently. The high school at which I teach has a clear system: the first instance of cheating puts the student on academic probation (meaning no sports or other extra-curricular activities) and the second leads to expulsion. The first penalty might seem lenient, but these are all highly competitive students heading off to college, and a year on probation means a year-long gap in those extra-curriculars that college admissions committees adore.If Emory lacks such a policy, that would seem to me to be a top priority for professors and administrators.

One of the reasons cheating continues is because more than a few of my teaching colleagues don’t check their students’ work. I don’t know if this amounts to a “dirty little secret,” but it’s a fact.I spend most of one class showing my students how simple it is to determine plagiarism. Turnitin.com works and is getting better, but plagiarismchecker.com also works and doesn’t require you to open an account. Another thing I do is allow students to submit a draft of their paper-in-progress in advance of the due date. Although only a few of my students ever take advantage of this — What? Get my paper done early? — I often find plagiarism. Sometimes it looks inadvertent, sometimes not so inadvertent. But at least they can find out if they still have work to do before submitting their paper for a grade. Some of my colleagues would never dream of doing this — What? Read a student’s paper twice? — and so it goes.

My college has a draconian policy about cheating: the penalty, regardless of nature or worth of the assignment, is expulsion. Having a tough penalty can lead to nullification of the policy, if faculty won’t turn in a cheater because the punishment seems too grave. A student honor council handles all the cases, which leads to other challenges: variations from year to year about what constitutes an honor violation; reluctance to convict seniors; and huge times drains on faculty who have to educate each group of students on the council about cheating and plagiarism. The positive result _seems_ to be less cheating overall, but there’s no empirical evidence of that: it is part of a faith tradition and thus cannot be studied or even questioned.

Please do not forget the “We Aim to Please U” type institutions. In my previous position, I caught more cheaters in the first semester of working there than I had done thus far in my entire teaching career, graduate school included. Who was penalized for this? Why, that would be me, when the paying customers um I mean dedicated, hard-working scholars at this fine school (which, according to the highly paid PR department, is striving to be “the best” of its size and status in the region) went screaming to the tenured faculty about how haaaaaaard my classes were and how I was meeeeeaaaaannnnnn to them. My classes were not unduly challenging, nor was I mean. But for undergraduates who were accustomed to cheating and to having faculty turn a blind eye (or to excuse them with “oh, the poor little sweethearts just didn’t know any better”) the notion that there would be penalties for their dishonesty was an absolute outrage, one to be met with fury.It must be nice for someone working at Cornell, where there surely are standards. For many, the lack of power that is part of being an adjunct or a factor of working at a no-prestige institution that is headed by a delusional administration whose fantasies are stoked by a highly-paid PR department, makes it impossible to uphold standards. I never believed that places like my former institution existed until I actually worked at one. But they do. So, your Cornell grad should hope and pray not to either end up a powerless adjunct or at horse-apple spinning diploma mill. Really.

Thanks, lurquita. You are heading in the right direction with your criticism of “places like my former institution.” I think I know the place you’re talking about… a regional college called a university, where students are entertained practically each evening with this or that celebration, Homepage promotional ads with bright-eyed students supposedly reading under a tree, where some students are so poorly prepared that they aren’t proficient enough on the web to disguise their sloppy cut and paste. Where each has a cell phone more valuable than my tiny, rusted import. Where the tuition paid by the students in one class is twenty times (20X) my no-benefits, no loyalty, no respect for my Ph.D. status. All I am is a place holder. An adjunct. A shim for the university–I fill a slot that holds the university together, but easily replaced. It can only get worse as students are forced to pay more for elite universities and receive less educational rigor. I wouldn’t give fifteen cents for some of the students who EXPECT to get into a graduate program. …..Plagiarism? Hey! if they don’t turn in the Pledge of Allegiance as an original who am I to challenge their veracity. I suppose that Cornell doesn’t care either. Why would they? One class of students encountering one teacher with high standards could be very costly — five unhappy students …maybe one hundred thousand dollars. Oppressed, exploited adjuncts aren’t going to poke Chairs or Heads in the eye with a jagged stick. Lower and lower standards will produce smaller and smaller teeny tiny little itty bitty brains.

SIU’s unintentional plagiarism concept as contrived sophistry? http://ipbiz.blogspot.com/2009/11/sius-unintentional-plagiarism-concept.html

Russhunt – I don’t understand your comment about education versus morality. When did higher education turn away from educating the whole person? While I think that it’s foolish for an institution to throw a student out based upon one mistake, it would seem to me that a second or third episode of cheating would indicate an unredeemable level of academic dishonesty. Any degree would be tainted. . .forever. And if the behavior carried through in the business world, the reputation of the institution could be lessened in the eyes of hiring managers. And by the way, any faculty member that turns a blind eye, regardless of how draconian the punishment, is doing a terrible disservice to the institution and more importantly, to the honest students who do their own work!

I think a lot of “contingent faculty” (I really hate that term) and tenure-track faculty are afraid and do their best to keep a low profile. By the time they make it through the tenure hurdles, well, the fire is gone.

What’s wrong then with old fashioned “exams”?No books or notes in with the examinees. Everything hand-written.Or is THAT too much wotrk for the lecturers??

willynilly — Okay, you’ve got my attention at least. What’s the real reason the Assistant Professor of German Studies didn’t get tenure? Are you claiming that a professor must be a conservtive to get tenure at Emory?

No redweather, I am not suggesting one must be a conservative to get tenure at Emory – but you should investigate that theory. You may be correct. My target is Bauerlein. He enjoys attacking and finding fault with a good number of noted educators, my misrepresenting their work or by giving his personal interpretation of their theses 9which, of course, is untrue). But, in doing so, he hides behind the shadow of the pen. Now he has an opportunity to openly address a real issue, which sits immediately under his nose. My writing was actually cynical. I’m sure, Bauerlein will do and say nothing about the tenure situation even though he has all the actual facts before him. I have always suspected that he was gutless, so I’m simply allowing him to prove my point in public. See, I’m really a nice guy.

An odd charge of “gutlessness” here, from one who hides behind a pseudonym. As far as I know, I have never met Professor Butler, redweather, and know nothing about the case. But if he contacted me as a colleague asking for advice or support, I’d say, “Yeah, let’s talk.”

Sorry, Mark, but it wasn’t me who said you are gutless. I was merely responding to willynilly, who wrote,”I’m sure, Bauerlein will do and say nothing about the tenure situation even though he has all the actual facts before him. I have always suspected that he was gutless, so I’m simply allowing him to prove my point in public.”I’m not in the habit of calling people gutless, and think willynilly is way off base for doing so.

“This is a matter of education, not morality, and “I’ll slap you even harder if you do that again” isn’t education.”Wrong. In fact, I find that students that have been educated and know “the rules” are the WORST offenders. It isn’t a matter of teaching them why this is bad. They know why. They get it. They do it anyway because they are lazy, they don’t have time, or they simply get off on it.I, for one, wish that my colleagues were harsher with this. Take even the most naive of freshmen, and I guarantee you that they have a pretty good feeling that copying and pasting from the web is a no go. I’m tired of protecting the little dears with BS like “Oh, but they didn’t know the rules,” and such. That is exactly the kind of pandering that allows the problem to become out of control in the first place.

I started teaching courses that had a writing requirement as a way to increase enrollments in my courses, which were not drawing sufficient enrollments because they were perceived as “requiring too much work” and “not an easy pass”. I then discovered that I had to teach academic writing, so I began exploring how to do that. One useful requirement was that students submit drafts, and by looking at the draft, one can compare it with the finished product and more easily detect plagiarism. I would also google certain expressions, and often find websites from which material had been downloaded verbatim. Many students didn’t like this, but some really appreciated learning how to write an academic paper, with things like a review of the literature, a conclusion that matched the original statement of purpose, and so on. One of my students took the course when she was an employee at the Penn, and because she wasn’t a “real” Penn student thought she needed to work a little harder at meeting the requirements. She ended up doing the best job, and got the best grade for the course. Then she entered college somewhere else, and the first time she had to submit a paper, did it the way I had taught her. The instructor called her into his office, because he assumed she had plagiarized it.She then showed him my website, and he was amazed–no undergraduate at that college had ever written a paper like that!She wrote me about it and it made me feel finally rewarded for all the slogging through drafts and having to repeat myself over and over.

Back when I taught a required writing course at diplomamill state u, I devised a series of in-class writing assignments as well as out-of-class writing assignments that required students to produce a series of documents before being allowed to produce the final paper. Cheaters and plagiarists stumbled somewhere along the way of producing: a thesis statement; a search history of terminology used, databases accessed, and documents used; a detailed content outline of their paper (the KILLER exercise that generated the most complaints because it required the students to actually think about and organize the material and their ideas); and finally, the paper (superfluous if a good detalied content outline was produced). Approvals were required at each step. It worked in the 1990s but may not work with the rip ‘n tear, instant-gratification generation that seems unable to concentrate on multiple-step, long-term projects.

My undergraduate institution had an honor policy for assessments…the professor was not in the room while students completed assessments. Students were required to write and sign an honor statement, “I am unaware of any aid being given or received.” If one did not sign it, they were privately called to the professors office, to explain, or in many cases sign the statement they had forgotten to earlier. I don’t recall students cheating, though I am sure they did. I remember one student getting cause and being suspended a semester, which is quite rough for a small, private college where most everyone is on the same 4 year track.In graduate school, there was a scandal with the Engineering department theses…apparently current engineering grade students were turning in theses that HEAVILY borrowed from previously completed theses from the same school. As a former K-12 teacher, I taught my students about plagarism, and unfortunately cause many kids continuing to copy. I worked with both low-income and upper middle class, private school students, and the upper middle class students were the worst! They refused to take responsibility, and even worse, their parents defended them–to the point where they were attempting to get me fired and tarish my reputation with other parents…because their child copied a paper!

I teach at an institution that doesn’t use turnitin (can’t afford it) and I’m wondering if anyone out there knows of a FREE plagiarism checker.Thanks for your help!

skittler — Plagiarismchecker.com is super easy to use and pretty good, albeit free. Altavista, one of the early search engines, also has a very workable plagiarism checker.

I am a hawk about cheating. I teach writing, and I always found many cases of cheating which I dealt with by giving the student a zero but allowing them to rewrite once. This was a very laborious process and added many hours to my (adjunct) workload. So last semester I set up Safe Assign and had my students submit online. Wow; I was astounded at the results. More than half were cheating by copying off the internet, far more than I caught doing the checking myself. I gave out a lot of zeros–and guess what? The students quit cheating. (All but one who was amazingly unable to learn that he would be caught, even after five rejected papers).I swear by Safe Assign. When the student protests that they did not cheat, the documentation is right there. All have admitted their culpability. One caveat: Safe Assign flags many quotes as copied because students do not always set them off properly. I always double check what Safe Assign flags to make sure that I am not unfair to a student. It has also helps me to catch the “rewriters” who plagiarise by rewriting someone else’s essay just by changing some of the words. None of this addresses the issue of why students cheat. There is research that addresses that issue. When I was in college, the frats were famous for organized cheating rings. My community college students are pikers in comparison.

To the bigger question…about light penalties for cheating…It would be hard to ignore the tempest OUTSIDE the campus teapot.In a society, where Wall Street steals the pensions of the elderly wobbling in their walkers, the college tuitions of the next generation, decade-long investments of hard workers, our politicians have NO idea what “truth” looks like, our neighbors are being foreclosed and evicted from their homes by financial monsters running our economy FURTHER into the ground, AND the constant message to our society is to GET IT, you DESERVE IT and prevent others from sharing IT with you, do we really wonder why our “best and brightest” cheat?Let’s focus on the thieves that have all but destroyed the “American Dream” by separating them from their 20 bedroom hunting lodges in the Rockies, penthouses in London, waterfront mansions in Palm Beach, endless cruises of the worlds’s oceans and THEN put their NAMES and FACES on the 6 o’clock news and THEN MAYBE, the message that dishonesty, greed and the abuse of others IS NOT an American value, will the incidence of “cheating” be reduced.No matter of campus judicial policy or purported restraints are going to stop students who have been brainwashed into a sense that all is justified as long as I get “mine” at the end. Cheating” in Pscyh 101 or Calculus II is not of much consequence to students have been themselves “cheated” out of a sense of fairplay, morality or a basic sense of decency LONG before the came to campus to attend pep rallies for steroid-enhanced athletes.It’s been said before and will be said again, our colleges and universities ONLY reflect the values of the bigger society. Not much left to debate after we acknowledge that unavoidable and sordid reality.