COLLOQUY

THE QUESTION

RESPONSES

BACKGROUND

By ALISON SCHNEIDER

A few years ago, a professor at a Southern university suspected a student of plagiarism. What did the professor do? Absolutely nothing. The messy case didn't seem worth

ALSO SEE: Join the debate: Are professors doing enough to combat student cheating? Do administrators back up faculty members when cheating incidents are reported? Is cheating getting worse? (The responses)

the anxiety or aggravation, so he graded the assignment as usual and passed the student on.

Think that's unusual? Think again.

A law professor at Howard University decided not to file cheating charges against a student who had beaten him to the punch. The student had lodged a grievance about the professor's inquiry into cheating first.

Then there was the scientist at a mid-Atlantic university who opted not to penalize two students he suspected of cheating on a lab report. He was afraid his students wouldn't like him.

Educators have been lamenting the sorry state of student ethics for years. Term-paper mills, computer hacking, crib notes scrawled inside baseball caps: Good grades are in, good values are out, professors proclaim. But academics wax far less eloquent when asked what they are doing to root out wrongdoing. That may be because many of them aren't doing much at all. Preventing and punishing cheating languish at the bottom of most professors'"to do" lists -- if they make the list at all.

"In the majority of cases of trivial cheating, I think most professors turn a blind eye," says Donald L. McCabe, the associate provost for campus development at Rutgers University at Newark, who has studied the issue. "The number who do nothing is very small, but the number who do very little is very large."

He surveyed 1,800 students on nine campuses in 1993 and found that 70 per cent of the students had cheated at least once during their college careers. But when Mr. McCabe asked 800 professors at 16 institutions if they had ever reported cheating, 40 per cent said "never," 54 per cent checked "seldom" and a mere 6 per cent picked "often."

How do professors handle cheaters? Quietly and quickly, most reply. Roving eyes during an examination: A stern warning should do the trick. Copying on a homework assignment: Force the student to do it again. Plagiarizing a paper: Give the student an F.

As for lodging formal charges against a student, forget it, most professors say. It's not worth the trouble. The university judicial process is laborious, even labyrinthine, and the punishments frequently bear little connection to the crimes, they say. At the few institutions with honor codes, the issues can be slightly different and the reporting of infractions slightly higher, but many professors there still prefer to deal with cheaters in the privacy of their own offices.

Joe Kerkvliet, an associate professor of economics at Oregon State University, wants that to change. He never gave cheating much thought until 1991 when some students in a lecture class told him that academic dishonesty was the crutch on which many of his pupils were leaning. "Cheating was going on on my watch, and I never detected it," he says. "I felt betrayed."

So he decided to restore his confidence in the classroom. Instead of lounging at the front of the lecture hall during exams, he started working the room -- walking the aisles, making eye contact, even telling students to take off their baseball caps. He switched the format from multiple-choice questions to essays, refused to let students sit next to one another, and handed out different versions of the same exam.

The tactics worked. "Since then, I haven't had other instances where cheating occurred," he says -- at least, none that he knows of. "It was a wake-up call."

Now he wants to sound the alarm for other academics who are asleep on the job. He is the co-author of an article, to be published in The Journal of Economic Education, that is titled "Can We Control Cheating in The Classroom?" The short answer: Yes.

For the article, Mr. Kerkvliet surveyed more than 500 students in 12 courses on two campuses. In some courses, as little as .002 per cent of the class admitted to cheating. In others, the figure climbed to 35 per cent. There was nothing accidental about the spread, he says. In classes where professors made it a priority to stamp out cheating, it didn't happen. When it was taken more lightly, it occurred more liberally.

The most effective tactic: having a tenure-track faculty member, instead of a graduate student, teach the course. That reduces the likelihood of cheating by 32 per cent, Mr. Kerkvliet says. Multiple versions of the same exam knock down transgressions by 25 per cent. Harsh warnings about cheating at the outset of each test and additional proctors reduce the probability that students will sneak a peek at a neighbor's work by about 12 per cent apiece.

As for eliminating multiple-choice exams or prohibiting students from sitting next to one another during tests, Mr. Kerkvliet says don't bother. Cheaters are nothing if not ingenious, he explains. That's why professors need to smarten up, he says.

Cheating used to occur like clockwork in Gary A. Ybarra's introductory course in circuits. But last year, the assistant research professor of electrical and computer engineering at Duke University started handing out a lengthy warning about cheating on the first day of the semester. Once a week, the class discusses academic integrity. Before he launched his campaign against cheating, cases would arise every other semester. These days, he says, he doesn't spot any at all.

So why aren't more professors following his lead? "Because there's a division among faculty about what our role is in preventing cheating," Mr. Kerkvliet explains. "When I've presented my research, I've been confronted with questions from professors asking, 'Why should we care?'" Especially, professors add, when administrators don't seem to.

Lately, that has become a familiar complaint. A spate of cheating scandals has shaken professorial confidence in the effectiveness of university judicial panels. Scholars claim they're getting shafted by the system. Guilty verdicts are being overturned. Administrators, fearful of lawsuits or bad publicity, back down when challenged by litigious students. Professors who push to penalize cheaters somehow find themselves tied to the whipping post.

Last year, an adjunct claimed his contract had not been renewed by Fordham University because he had pushed too hard on plagiarism charges.

Two years ago, North Carolina State University's Board of Trustees overturned a seemingly clear-cut case of cheating. Jerome J. Perry, then a professor of microbiology there, accused two students of cheating on a multiple-choice exam. The students filled out their answer sheets, and then wrote their responses in large letters next to each question, repeatedly circled their selections on the test, and held up their papers to improve each other's views. A teaching assistant witnessed the event from eight feet away, and a student sitting across from the accused confirmed the T.A.'s report.

The students were found guilty and then lost at every level of appeal until the board overturned the verdict. The trustees didn't think cheating had been proved beyond a reasonable doubt.

The only thing in doubt, in Mr. Perry's opinion, is the board's integrity. "There is a palpable cynicism on this campus among Faculty regarding the merits of filing misconduct charges," Mr. Perry wrote to the trustees. "Prior to filing these charges I discussed the case with colleagues and everyone I talked to suggested that it was futile and that I would ultimately be humiliated."

He was. Mr. Perry says his grading techniques were questioned, and his relationships with administrators frayed. He retired in 1998 and may sue: "It's obvious that the university decided that a cover-up was better and that they had to protect the trustees and not the faculty."

Despite the fireworks, the board hasn't budged. The trustees make no apologies for their decision and say that the case was far less open and shut than Mr. Perry and his supporters seem to believe.

Andras J.E. Bodrogligeti, a professor of Turkic languages and culture at the University of California at Los Angeles, ran into trouble himself when a seemingly clear-cut case of cheating suddenly became procedurally convoluted. In 1996, he caught 30 students with crib sheets in his Uzbek exam. He filed charges against all of them, but the university allowed him to pursue disciplinary action against only the five students that either he or his proctors had actually seen using the cheat sheets.

A week later, a dozen students crowded into his office and surrounded him. According to Mr. Bodrogligeti, one student pushed the professor's head down to the desk, stuck a fist next to his face, and said that he would punch the professor and get him kicked out of the university if he didn't withdraw the charges. "That's blackmail. That's a threat. That's an assault," Mr. Bodrogligeti says. But when he complained to administrators, "there was no follow-up."

The charges were brought two years ago. Since then, two students have pleaded guilty and three of the cases have yet to be heard. In the meantime, U.C.L.A. has canceled Mr. Bodrogligeti's 13-year-old Central Asian summer program, and administrators have been investigating him for professional misconduct. Officials declined to comment on the investigation, but Mr. Bodrogligeti says students told him that they had been contacted by the university and asked whether he had ever sold his lecture notes to them.

He says his reputation has suffered on the campus, and his class enrollment has shrunk from 200 students to eight as a result. "Students were scared away."

Mr. Bodrogligeti says he feels scared, too: "I am the only one who speaks up. Maybe I'm the fool who says the king has no clothes. If your superiors don't cooperate in the line of due process, you don't have a chance with students. They will be out of hand."

The only thing that has gotten out of hand, campus officials say, is Mr. Bodrogligeti's allegations. Yes, the case has been delayed, they say, but that's because the evidence is complicated and the academic-misconduct office is overloaded. U.C.L.A., which has 35,000 students, handles 200 to 300 misconduct cases a year. The Bodrogligeti hearings are scheduled for this month.

''I am troubled about the timing," says Robert J. Naples, U.C.L.A.'s dean of students. "It probably could have been handled better, but I resent that this one case has become the flagship for how U.C.L.A. handles academic dishonesty. Ninety-eight per cent of our cases end in punishment." Despite that statistic, Mr. Naples worries that professors will latch onto Mr. Bodrogligeti's case as a reason to handle suspected cheating cases privately, instead of institutionally.

He may be right. Many professors think they are better off playing outside the rules than by them. Some scholars don't see the pursuit of academic honesty as part of their job descriptions. They're professors, not policemen. Others prefer to devote their energies to the 300 students in their class who care about learning instead of wasting time on the three scofflaws who don't. Still others say the punishment rarely fits the crime. It can be too harsh -- a two-month suspension for an inexperienced, overworked freshman -- or too trivial. The penalty -- whether a firm warning or a failing grade -- is more just, professors say, if they administer it themselves.

The real sticking point is time. Tracking down a plagiarist's sources can take days, sometimes weeks -- time that professors can ill afford at the end of a semester, when papers start flooding in. Efficient judicial panels can wrap up a case in a few hours; slipshod ones can delay scheduling a hearing for years.

That schedule doesn't sit well with harried intellectuals, says Daniel H. Garrison, a classics professor at Northwestern University. "Most professors at a place like Northwestern can't be bothered. They're not rewarded for teaching; they're rewarded for research. There's no future in pursuing cheating from the standpoint of a professor's self-interest."

Still, he adds, nailing a cheater has its rewards -- like the time Mr. Garrison accused a student of plagiarism and whisked out the book from which her paper had been lifted. The student said she'd never seen the book before. It turned out the plagiarized paper had been written by her mother 20 years before.

Time isn't the only thing on the chopping block in a cheating case; sometimes a professor's head can be, too. Many academics fear that they'll be blamed for their students' ethical violations. Before J. Frederick Truitt left the University of Washington, in 1991, he surveyed his students, and 40 per cent of them admitted that they had cheated or knew students who had. When he shared his findings at a faculty meeting, his colleagues sat in stony silence. "It was as if I had brought up death or sex, some forbidden topic," says Mr. Truitt, who is now a professor of management at Willamette University. "Professors think that if they talk about this, people will think that they're not a good-enough teacher to inspire students to behave ethically."

Those professors who do pursue cheating allegations often complain that they feel victimized by the process. Sandra C. Greer, a professor of chemical engineering at the University of Maryland at College Park, accused a student in her ethics course of plagiarism in 1993. A fellow faculty member became the student's champion. He contended that Ms. Greer had manufactured the case to harass the student, and tried to file a grievance against her. Part of his complaint: that Ms. Greer wasn't fit to teach an ethics course because she is gay. The grievance was dismissed.

John L. Hill, an associate professor of law at St. Thomas University, found himself in hot water, too, after he filed plagiarism charges, in 1995, against five students in his ethics seminar. Two of the cases were dismissed, and a third student was acquitted -- decisions Mr. Hill finds hard to swallow given the evidence he presented.

The fourth student, who had copied 25 pages of a Stanford Law Review article, was found guilty -- but just barely, by a 3-to-2 vote. And the fifth student, who had lifted several pages from a book on the need to legislate morality, pleaded guilty. Both students received identical punishments: writing a five-page paper on plagiarism. Neither of them was forced to do it.

Mr. Hill didn't get off so easy. During the hearing, the defense questioned how clean his own record was on plagiarism. Several students threatened to sue him. He got harassing telephone calls, eggs were thrown at his house, his front door was ripped off twice. People hissed when he walked into the auditorium for convocation.

"What I went through in the trial, no one should have to go through," Mr. Hill says. "I had caught some people who were cheating and had documented that, and yet I was being vilified. I was the bad guy."

Fortunately, Mr. Hill adds, something good came out of all the badness: The law school reformed its honor code. Professors and administrators now sit on the previously all-student judicial panels.

Despite the risks, many professors who have gone through the wringer say they would use the judicial system again -- albeit reluctantly. Acting like the Lone Ranger may be more efficient, but it doesn't do much for due process, the thinking goes. Moreover, cheating needs to be punished institutionally, not just individually. That's the only way to make punishments consistent with the crimes, advocates say.

As for getting sued -- a worry that weighs heavily on many professors' minds -- that's more likely to happen if you work outside the system than within it, people warn. "I don't know of a single case where a faculty member has been held liable for a good-faith report of academic dishonesty -- even if he's proved to be wrong," says Gary Pavela, the director of judicial programs and student ethical development at Maryland. But institutions don't protect employees who flout university rules -- and neither do courts of law.

Wary professors need to remember that for every case that goes wrong, many others go right, Mr. Pavela says. Robert L. Wolke, a professor emeritus of chemistry at the University of Pittsburgh, has had a taste of both. In 1991, the university dropped what Mr. Wolke thought was an open-and-shut case of cheating when the student threatened to sue. But a few years before that, he filed charges against a nursing student who had been cheating her way through his chemistry class, and she was expelled. Years later, the professor and student ran into one another. The student didn't berate him for turning her in. She thanked him for turning her life around.

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