To Catch A Cheat
CSU, Chico, like college campuses nationwide, is working on ways
to combat
academic dishonesty
by Mary Abowd
Peter Lopez got his first dose of academic dishonesty as a graduate
student at a uni-versity in New York. An exam proctor for a 500-student
mega course, Lopez observed a web of cheating so complex it made
crib sheets look like child’s play.
“I saw students using codes, signals, and sounds to indicate
answers,” he says. “[They’d] tap in different
places on the desk to indicate a, b, c, or d. There were even codes
for ‘What question are you on?’ ” Catching the
cheaters, Lopez says, was “very much a game of cat and mouse.”
Now in his fifth year as an assistant professor of psychology at
California State University, Chico, Lopez tries to stop cheating
before it begins. “I tell students that I take it very seriously,”
he says. On the first day of class, he distributes a course syllabus
containing Web sites that address academic dishonesty. He talks
to students specifically about plagiarism, a form of cheating defined
as using another’s work—a sentence, a paragraph, or
even an entire paper—without giving credit to its author.
He’s explicit about his “top-level” penalty for
plagiarism: He gives students an F in the course and reports them
to the Office of Student Judicial Affairs.
And yet, despite the warnings, Lopez says that almost every semester
he encounters students who plagiarize—everything from failing
to cite sources correctly to copying a term paper off the Web.
In nine semesters, Lopez has had only seven cases of plagiarism.
But they exhibit one troubling commonality. “Virtually every
student I’ve ever caught plagiarizing has told me, ‘This
is what I’ve always done, and it’s never been a big
deal to anybody else,’” he says.
Last spring, a group of students, faculty, and administrators at
CSU, Chico decided to make it a big deal. After reports surfaced
that two plagiarized master’s theses had been submitted in
the graduate school, they formed what became known as the Academic
Integrity Committee to address the issue of cheating. A series of
forums and focus groups soon followed to spark campuswide conversation.
The spark ignited a blaze of emotion—and frustration. “Students
get really passionate about it really quickly,” says junior
Thomas Whitcher, director of university affairs for Associated Students
and chair of the committee. “You stay up all night and study
for your chemistry final and get a C, but a person who you know
cheated went to bed at 11 pm and got an A on it.”
It’s a situation that leaves honest students feeling powerless.
“They get upset and say, ‘I see so-and-so cheating in
my class, and there’s really nothing I can do to combat it,’”
says Whitcher. He would like to see the committee address that issue,
as well as the negative outcome that sometimes follows: “A
lot of what we’ve heard from students is ‘If you can’t
beat ’em, you might as well join ’em.’ ”
Whitcher says the Academic Integrity Committee is focusing on everything
from faculty education—issuing “survival kits”
to help curb cheating in the classroom—to staffing needs in
the university’s Office of Student Judicial Affairs (where,
at present, only one staffperson handles academic dishonesty cases
on a part-time basis). By the end of spring semester 2004, the committee
would like to have established a university honor code, a statement
emphasizing the importance of doing one’s own work that could
appear in places such as the university Web site, blue books, and
course syllabi.
An honor code would help “change the culture of the university
from the ground up,” says sophomore Sheena Guess, an Academic
Integrity Committee member. “We want to let everybody know
that every time they cheat, their diploma doesn’t mean as
much.”
Cheating is by no means unique to CSU, Chico. “This is not
a Chico State problem; this is not even just an American problem,”
says Robert Jackson, dean of the School of Graduate, International,
and Sponsored Programs. “When you talk to international students,
this is going on in Brazil and India and all around the world.”
Epidemic of dishonesty
On most campuses, more than 75 percent of students admit to some
cheating, either on tests or on written assignments, according to
a study by the Center for Academic Integrity, a clearinghouse for
academic dishonesty and related issues based at Duke University
in North Carolina. A fall 2003 conference sponsored by the center
hosted more than 100 colleges and universities from the United States,
Canada, Europe, the Middle East, and Asia, all of them grappling
with the rise in academic dishonesty.
Some blame the increase partly on society’s declining ethical
values. “Start with Enron and go all the way back to Watergate,”
says Wendy Diamond, a CSU, Chico reference librarian. “There
has been a sense that cheating or getting by doesn’t really
matter.”
In fact, in some homes it’s encouraged. In a recent cover
story in the San Francisco Chronicle Magazine, writer C.W.
Nevius places much of the blame for cheating squarely on parents
who are bent on helping their children get ahead. “What would
you call it now when parents attempt to get their student diagnosed
with a learning disability to get more time on SAT tests?”
writes Nevius. “Or when they do homework and science projects
for their kids? Or browbeat the teacher in an attempt to force a
better grade?”
For today’s college students, lax societal attitudes about
cheating have collided with another likely culprit—the Internet.
Gone are the days when plagiarizing meant copying from library books
or ordering term papers by mail. Now, with a few clicks of a computer
mouse, students have instant access to a vast world of information—text,
music, graphics—that is readily accessible and easy to download.
This has made cheating—especially plagiarizing written material—easier,
faster, and, experts say, more rampant.
“With the Internet, there’s a sense that you’re
entitled to get all this stuff for free,” notes Diamond. And
that can easily slip into cutting and pasting material for use in
homework assignments and term papers without citing the source.
The “cut and paste” phenomenon has even changed the
way students describe how they do their work. “Students no
longer talk about ‘writing’ a paper,” says Jackson.
“They say, ‘I need to put a paper together.’ A
lot of students will say ‘I can put a paper together in two
or three hours.’ ”
Using information from the Web is not, in itself, wrong, says Diamond.
She and others distinguish between what they call “blatant”
plagiarism and “inadvertent” plagiarism. The difference,
Diamond says, is “copying intentionally a whole section or
even just a paragraph versus not quite knowing how to cite it correctly.”
A nation of cheats?
By all accounts, blatant plagiarism is prevalent on college campuses.
The results of a November 2003 study on the impact of technology
on learning, released by the National Survey of Student Engagement
at Indiana University, Bloomington, found that 87 percent of the
60,000 students surveyed at 420 four-year colleges and universities
reported that their peers at least “sometimes” lift
material from the Internet for use in academic papers without citing
the sources.
Last spring, the issue came to light at CSU, Chico after it was
discovered that two graduate school students had turned in completed
master’s theses that had been plagiarized (two additional
plagiarized theses were caught in the draft stages). In one case,
a student attempted to submit a paper that had been turned in a
few years earlier by another student; the other was a case of wholesale
download from the Internet.
When it came to punishing the offenders, Jackson—who, as dean
of the graduate school, signs off on all final graduate theses and
projects—says existing policy was far too weak. It stated
only that graduate students who plagiarize their final theses or
projects would be “dropped from the graduate program.”
“That didn’t mean they couldn’t go from business
to public administration,” says Jackson. So he and other faculty
members, in conjunction with the Office of Student Judicial Affairs,
swiftly amended the policy, making expulsion the likely outcome
for cases of blatant plagiarism.
“Expulsion means the students can never re-enter the university,
and if they want their transcripts sent someplace else, it would
show they were expelled for academic dishonesty,” explains
Jackson.
But for undergraduates who commit plagiarism or other forms of cheating
at CSU, Chico, expulsion is highly unlikely. “If it’s
a pretty clear-cut case of fraud, the student fails that course
and is put on probation with the university,” says Lizanne
Leach, coordinator for university student discipline with the Office
of Student Judicial Affairs.
If caught committing a similar offense a second time, however, the
student is suspended, usually for a semester or a year. Suspension
leaves open the possibility that the student could one day return
to the university.
Leach says that during the past year, she’s dealt with about
100 cases of cheating. Her spare and neatly organized Kendall Hall
office belies the kinds of untidy situations that unfold there each
semester. She’s had more than a few students come to her sobbing
that they plagiarized because their grandmother died or their girlfriend
broke up with them. Leach says she hears them out but ultimately
doles out punishment evenly. “I feel very sorry for you,”
she tells them, “but those things happen. Having those things
happen and being a cheater—those are two different things.”
Some say the policy doesn’t go far enough. “If it’s
clearly a case of blatant plagiarism, the first offense ought to
be indication on the transcript that can never be removed and suspension
for six months on top of that,” says Andrew Flescher, an assistant
professor in the Department of Religious Studies. A second offense
should merit expulsion, he says.
Flescher, who teaches ethics courses and is director of the campus’s
Center for Applied and Professional Ethics, says that having a serious
attitude about cheating and plagiarism legitimates a degree from
CSU, Chico. “The message that I want to get out is that getting
a degree is not the same thing as winning an economic credential,”
he says. “There is something intrinsically valuable about
a college education, namely, the unique, hard-won, and rewarding
work that a student puts into the process of earning credits for
graduation.”
Associate professor of journalism Glen Bleske favors stringent punishment
for cheaters but cautions that not all cheating is equal. “Punishment
must fit the crime and the intent of the student,” he says.
Cheating usually occurs, says Bleske, because students with poor
study habits and time-management skills make bad choices under pressure.
“You have a real problem when a student makes a bad choice,”
he says. “What should the penalty be?”
Educating the educators
Under current university policy, punishment is left up to the professor,
who is under no obligation to involve Judicial Affairs. “There
are professors who do catch people cheating, but it never gets reported,”
says Lopez. “My fear is that the same student is pulling the
same stunt on multiple professors.”
Thus the Academic Integrity Committee will focus part of its outreach
efforts on faculty. “If faculty are not diligent about how
they test, about what they do with prior papers, they can create
an environment where it looks like they really don’t care,”
says Jackson. “That sends the wrong message to students.”
Many professors find ways to make cheating far less likely, while
also conveying that they value integrity. Among his student reporters,
Bleske sometimes encounters what he calls the “Jayson Blair
situation.” (Blair resigned from the New York Times in
May 2003 after it was discovered he had plagiarized or fabricated
dozens of stories.) In his reporting assignments, Bleske requires
that students give him a list of their sources with phone numbers.
Often he’ll call them to check up. “A student will think
twice about making up an interview if I’m going to call that
person and ask,” he says.
Most plagiarism education at CSU, Chico happens in English 1, a
required course for the vast majority of first-year students. “We
do have problems once in a while with students plagiarizing, but
we have a bigger problem with students who don’t know the
conventions for citing properly,” says Chris Fosen, assistant
professor of rhetoric and composition. “Every year I hear
students [who misunderstand the definition of plagiarism] say, ‘If
you summarize it or paraphrase it, you don’t need to cite
it.’ ”
Fosen and his colleagues in the English department have worked to
educate the campus community about the distinction between blatant
and inadvertent plagiarism. “One we consider a punishable
offense,” he says. “The other we consider a teaching
opportunity.”
Besides using English classes to educate students about plagiarism,
they refer students to the Web site of the University Writing Center,
which provides tips on plagiarism prevention and includes instructions
on proper academic citation, including guidelines on citing Internet
sources.
High-tech detectives
Tougher policy changes in the graduate school have been accompanied
by using technology to help faculty track down plagiarism. The university
subscribes to Turnitin.com, an online plagiarism detection service.
Users upload a document onto the Turnitin database, which contains
billions of pages of text, and receive a report back indicating
whether the document contains words, sentences, or paragraphs similar
to those in the database or if it has been copied in its entirety.
The database helped Lopez track down his first case of blatant plagiarism.
“I knew as soon as I saw the paper, there was no way that
student wrote it, but I couldn’t find it, even with Google,”
he says. “I tried Turnitin, and boom! There it was—the
whole paper.”
This spring, graduate students will be required to turn in their
master’s theses and projects in both hard copy and electronic
format, so that they can be run through Turnitin. A department may
opt out, however, and two departments have done so.
The database has sparked controversy in academic circles because
a paper, once uploaded to the database, remains there. “The
student’s work is not his or her own anymore,” says
Fosen. “If a student signs up for a course, the student didn’t
necessarily agree for this to be done.”
Other professors are uncomfortable with Turnitin because of the
classroom dynamic it creates. “I don’t see myself primarily
as a marshal or a sheriff,” says Flescher. “I’m
a teacher. It’s not my job to be Inspector Andy, and I don’t
want that relationship with my students.”
Reliance on devices to catch cheaters may be ignoring a deeper educational
problem, one involving what is known as information literacy. “Information
literacy means knowing that you need information and being able
to find it and use it for some purpose in your life,” says
assistant librarian Kristin Johnson. “It seems like such a
no-brainer, knowing that you need information, but it’s harder
than that,” she adds. “What information do I need? How
much do I need? How do I use it to write my paper? How do I do it
ethically?”
Information literacy traditionally begins in the grade school library.
But deep cuts to California’s public school libraries and
library staff have produced a generation of college students who
may have missed out. A 1998 study by the nonprofit educational research
group EdSource found that California had the worst librarian-student
ratio in the nation: one librarian for every 6,334 students.
Guess says that as a freshman she didn’t understand what plagiarism
was exactly, only that she shouldn’t be doing it. “I’d
write papers so terrified that I was cheating accidentally that
it became a problem for me,” she recalls.
Closing that gap in education is one of the guiding principles of
Chico’s Academic Integrity Committee. “The committee
is huge on positive education,” Guess says. “We don’t
want students to be terrified, like I was.” She and other
students want their peers to see the positives of being a university
guided by values of academic honesty.
“If I walked into a classroom where I knew students cared,”
Guess says, “that would be really powerful.”
About the author
Mary Abowd is a former associate editor of Chicago
magazine. Her work has appeared in The Chicago Reporter,
the Chicago Sun-Times, The Progressive, and other
publications. An investigative story she wrote on computers in the
classroom won an Award of Excellence in Journalism from the Chicago
Association of Black Journalists. She now lives in Chico.
Cheating Trends
• Internet plagiarism is a growing concern on all campuses.
Without clear direction from faculty, most students have concluded
that “cut and paste” plagiarism—using a sentence
or two (or more) from different sources on the Internet and weaving
them together into a paper without appropriate citation—is
not a serious issue. While 10 percent of students admitted to such
behavior in 1999, this rose to 41 percent in a 2001 survey, with
the majority of students (68%) suggesting this was not a serious
issue.
• Academic honor codes can effectively reduce cheating. Surveys
conducted in 1990, 1995, and 1999, involving more than 12,000 students
on 48 campuses, demonstrate the impact of honor codes and student
involvement in controlling academic dishonesty. Serious test cheating
on campuses with honor codes is typically one-third to one-half
lower than on campuses lacking honor codes. The level of serious
cheating on written assignments is one-fourth to one-third lower.
• A study of almost 4,500 students at 25 schools, conducted
in 2000/2001, suggests cheating is also a significant problem in
high school—74 percent of the respondents admitted to one
or more instances of serious test cheating, and 72 percent admitted
to serious cheating on written assignments.
Source: Donald L. McCabe, professor of management and global
business, Rutgers University, and founder and first president of
the Center for Academic Integrity. Research material found at CAI’s
Web site at www.academicintegrity.org.
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