Of course many students will say that the school and the professor are over-reacting.  They will say that everyone cheats: What’s the big deal?  Also, rather in a cliche way, many students will say that people cheat in the real world.  But this is about more than an individual student’s choice to cheat in school.  This is about our society, our culture.  We cannot let cheating go unnoticed or unpunished when it is observed.  I’m glad that this professor and the university are making a “big stink” about it.  Watch ABC News reporting on this issue.  One UCF’s student responds, “This is college. Everyone cheats. Everyone cheats in life in general. I think you’d be hard pressed to find anyone in this testing lab who hasn’t cheated on an exam. They’re making a witch hunt out of absolutely nothing, as if they want to teach us some kind of moral lesson.”  What’s wrong with a moral lesson?  While some people might consider “moral lesson” something to be taught by our church leaders or parents, academic integrity and professonal ethics are legitimate concerns of universities and colleges.  Let’s just hope that the ethics seminar required for the confessing cheaters will be of some use…

My first class in M.Ed Course was “Seminar in Ethics and Legal Issues in Education” had a case-study analysis on PLAGIARISM. It is one of the ethical issues in the field of education. It is one aspect of dishonesty, a sort of cheating in the sense of copying someone else work, language and ideas and claiming as their own. In fact, in academic institution, plagiarism has been strictly prohibited and unacceptable. It is always a concern of the teachers and administrators that students’ work should represent their own effort, reflect their own thoughts and views. Many students, could be high school, college, and even graduate students, no matter how old they are and what career they are holding on tend to choose this path (plagiarizing). There are many reasons which drive anyone to commit this thing even if they are aware of its consequences. Some of these are laziness and simply complying the requirements in an easy way, which I believed to be the most common, poor time management, fear of taking the risk of their own work, or fear of failure, and some have just taken for granted the course and the consequences of this action.

Most cases, plagiarism happens to college and graduate students when they are working on their research paper (Theses/Dissertations/Independent Studies). Others who don’t want to undergo the difficult process in writing the paper, they opted to pay someone to write for them and even buy the whole book from an agency whose expertise are writing Theses/Dissertations. By simply giving the topic and the area and paying the services, you can have your finished book in a time. While others tend to copy from other studies by simply twisting and changing some words, they claimed it as their own. But it’s just so painful on the part of the owner knowing that someone else just simply edited her/his work and change the name.

It happened recently, when I learned that someone is simply copying my research paper (chapter 1). I really regret that I was so kind for sharing and sending him my paper. I feel so stupid for being so nice, thinking that I might help him as a guide but without realizing that he’s gonna copy it, copying paragraph by paragraph, sentence by sentence. Two persons (not even a closed friend) have the same thoughts, exactly the same organization of ideas in addressing the problem. It’s amazing, isn’t it? Yeah, it’s alarming. Well, he changed the main issue (problem) but how the problem was addressed in the paper was exactly copied. I was already anxious about it after sending my paper to him, when he said that he’s going to replicate my study but there was an advice that I should not panic, instead I should be happy that someone was thinking me as a model, so I didn’t react violently while thinking that during my research class, I was asked by our teacher too to send my paper to all my classmates as a guide. However, I got his manuscript and learned that he plainly copied…Yes, I cried. It’s unfair that I spent time, money, effort to gather all my resources, spent so many sleepless nights reading all of them just to grasp the idea and wrote. I’ve got even sick many times because of this, and there’s someone else simply edited the file that I sent to him and put his name and received credit in his research class. My teacher knew how my paper was improved from the first draft that I submitted…Yeah, I complained and hoping that he’s gonna change it as per advised by our teacher.

While many of the students, aside from copying the manuscript from others, they tend to doctored the results of the study (I mean the survey used to answer the research questions). In most cases, students conduct survey to few respondents only, get the trend of the answers and replicate them to the desired number of respondents, while some simply just answered all the questionnaires by themselves…Yes, it’s true. In fact, when I started floating my questionnaire two months ago, someone (my colleague) asked, how many sample schools do I have and suggested by saying “Why don’t you get the trend of answers and multiply it as many as you want rather than spending more money, effort and time?” My spirits gone, and said some striking words and added by saying “I want to publish my work, want it to be sufficient and reliable enough to represent the area of study and will be a relevant consideration for developments and most all I want my paper to represent myself”. Our papers, works and achievements always represent the personality that we possess. So, we must do the best we can in an honest way.

The same concept happened when I was still a new teacher here, someone suggested me to buy an Education Degree Certificate because my degree is not in the field of education. He further pointed out places where I can buy the certificates. So, shocking! Well, maybe they did, we don’t know. Actually, I don’t want to get closed to these kinds of people.

Why don’t we live in an honest way? Why do we need to lie? Why do we need to deceive people with our lies?

If we are honest with our works, we are also honest in our relationship with others. And we believed that more blessings will come for hard work and honesty in our self. Besides, we will not breach the academic honesty and other ethical code of conducts. We will live in justice and peace.

On the other aspect of life, honesty is an essential component in a relationship and even friendship to make it stronger and successful. However, this component is being taken for granted by some if not most of the people. They tend to be very nice and polite just to please and deceive others without their hearts and action on it. People are scared to tell the truth because they think that they might hurt others but the truth no matter how painful it is, is more appreciated than hearing the sweet lies. Lies can just loosen the trust and weaken the bond. Why don’t we honestly act and tell according to our feelings? It will be easy to understand and consider things and conflicts if we will be telling the truth. Then happiness will always be there.

how to cheat with your iPod (image from gadgetspage.com)

That’s what Charles Lipson calls it – “honest work.” And I love the concept. 

In the last couple of weeks, since the first day of classes, my college composition students and I have been talking about cheating.  I’ve asked them to consider this not as an issue about themselves (that is, not as a “Don’t plagiarize” message from me) but as a social issue, a cultural question.  We started with David Callahan’s The Culture of Cheating, a chapter called “Cheating from the Starting Line.”  One of the main ideas that came out of my students’ reading and discussing this chapter was that the issue really isn’t just about cheating. 

Really, it’s about the bigger educational approach.  The students don’t value learning.  They don’t value education.  They value schooling, the grades, the diploma, and what all of that means in their future.  Our current learning system doesn’t allow students the room to consider the process as the important part.  The result, the product (the grades) – that’s what matters.  Some might say that this is just poor excuse from cheating students (and their parents and teachers that ignore it or condone it).  I don’t believe so.  I don’t excuse the cheating behavior, but I also don’t want to ignore the motivational factors behind their choice to cheat.  The broken system or the approach certainly doesn’t  justify cheating, but it may explain widespread cheating.  I understand that if we want to address the cheating issue, we also have to ask how we can instill joy of discovery (a.k.a learinng) and teach them something relevant, something interesting, and something ENGAGING. That’s the buzz word these days, I know, and this makes it kind of a cliche.  But it’s a buzz word for a reason.  It’s important.  Really important. 

cartoon from cartoonstock.com

I believe that most often students who want to learn, who value learning and place it above other things (like grades) do not choose to cheat.  I believe that in most cases they choose to cheat when they feel cornered and when they panic (for whatever reason, including their own failure to manage time or the assignment).  This means, I believe, we can discourage cheating.  We can deter it.  We can prevent it.  We can do something about it.  And this is good news.

Lillian Conway (I have no idea who she is) had the great nerve to email me this SPECIAL OFFER – TODAY ONLY. (Clearly, she doesn’t know me or my ideas about this kind of stuff, either.)

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Do Not Reply to this Email.

Granted, it showed up in my Spam box. Appropriately. But still … That’s Messed Up!

And by the way, who signs their email “Sincerely, Do Not Reply to this Email” ?????????

That’s Messed Up, too!

essay writer needed (inner se)

I have a few reports I have to write for an online course I’m taking. This course is just for fun and it’s not for school, just non accredited knowledge for myself. That being said there are a few books that I just can not handle reading due to the material. I guess you can call it like it is and some may consider it cheating but I need someone to read the books I believe 4 in all not long reads and a write report and answer 24 questions for each book. I am happy to neg. price for this. I would be graded but once again it’s a non-accredited course and my reason is I just truly hate these 4 books. After these 4 books I can get to the stuff I really wanted to learn.

That’s messed up!

How do I even begin to count the ways in which that’s messed up? Let me start with three:

1. If you’re taking the course “for fun,” for “knowledge for myself,” then why wouldn’t you do the reading and posts? You are cheating yourself!
2. You “just truly hate” the books? Really? How would you know if you haven’t read them? Answer me that!
3. Why does “non-accredited” matter here? It’s still a course; you are still the student in it!
4. I know I was going to stop at three, but:  “Some may consider it cheating.” Um, yeah, MOST consider it cheating. You know why? IT IS CHEATING!

That’s Messed Up!

(Maybe I should reply to the ad. I see a teachable moment here; I just can’t help myself!)

About two dozen seniors at Hamilton Southeastern High School in the affluent northern suburbs of Indianapolis have been caught plagiarizing in a dual-enrollment college course, thanks to turnitin.com. Full story with video here, and there’s an official statement from the HSE superintendent on this issue here (.DOC, 20KB).

This would be an ordinary, though disappointing, story about students getting caught cheating if it weren’t for some head-scratchers here. First, this bit from the superintendent’s statement:

We took immediate action because the end of the school year was rapidly approaching. Several students were in danger of not graduating on time. We found a teacher who was willing to step up and administer a complete but highly accelerated online version of a class that would replace the credit that was lost due to cheating. Each student who wishes to graduate on time and participate in commencement now has the opportunity to do so. [my emphasis]

It’s troublesome that the superintendent chooses to describe the teacher as “stepping up” to deliver an online makeup course. “Stepping up” is what you call it when there’s something that needs to be done and somebody agrees to get it done. But it seems to me that the school system here owes these students absolutely nothing. HSE, in conjunction with Indiana University, offered a legitimate college course with clearly-defined parameters for academic performance, and HSE did a particularly thorough job describing the boundaries of academic honesty. The students chose to violate that contract and cheat. The school system is therefore not obliged to offer an online makeup course, or indeed to offer anything to these students at all. To imply that HSE does owe the students a path to graduate on time is like saying that if someone gets caught shoplifting, the grocery store owes it to the shoplifter to find a way to help him buy his groceries.

Also, what is the teacher who “stepped up” being paid to run this online course? If the teacher is being paid from public school coffers for this, and if I lived in Hamilton County, I would have a big problem with my tax money being spent to offer online courses to students guilty of cheating just so they can graduate on time — especially when public school money is historically scarce right now. Let the students find their own way to graduate. It’s not like they were barred from graduating on time, fair and square, in the first place. Let the residents’ school money go to help the students who are working hard and doing things the right way instead. (If the teacher’s doing it for free, then other questions arise.) This is the way we’d do it in college, and this is a college course, right?

HSE might think it’s doing right by the students in “allowing each student to work his or her way back toward the proper path so they can graduate on time, continue their educations [sic] and understand the benefits of making good choices” (quote from the superintendent’s statement). But isn’t this really illustrating the benefits of making bad choices — as in, go ahead and cheat, because the school will find a way to let you graduate on time anyway? Other than potentially not getting into IU, what consequences are these students having to face, exactly, other than sacrificing a bit of their summer to retake a course at taxpayer expense? (By the way, if this course is dual-credit, whose rules about academic dishonesty are supposed to be followed? IU’s appear to be more strict that Hamilton Southeastern’s.)

This bit from a fellow student is equally disturbing:

“If you’re going to do something dishonorable, there’s going to be consequences for it,” said [a fellow student, not part of the plagiarizing group]. But she says she sympathizes with her friends who were caught cheating. She claims students have been cheating for years, but this is the first year teachers have used the software system that gives them the ability to easily catch cheaters. She believes this incident likely serves as a lesson for students for years to come.

So, it’s about the consequences, not so much the act itself. The sympathy didn’t show up until turnitin.com caught them. Until we stop “sympathizing” with plagiarists and start treating plagiarism on the same level as lying and stealing — which it is both — this problem isn’t going to go away.

What’s your take on all this? Is HSE acting honorably or just enabling future plagiarism? What’s the best way to punish teenage plagiarists on the one hand but really help them make better choices on the other?

A year and a half ago, I taught an introduction to philosophy course independently. The lectures were in person, but the tests were online because the class only met once per week and I didn’t want to use up a whole week’s worth of lecture for each test. The students were repeatedly instructed, both in class and on the test itself, not to use any sources other than their notes and textbooks.

Upon grading the first test, I discovered that a few students had copied and pasted answers or parts of answers directly from Wikipedia and Yahoo! answers. This was very disappointing, and I dreaded having to deal with the situation. I arranged times to speak with the students, planning to deal with them pretty harshly.

However, when I spoke to them, I was surprised by what I heard. At least two of them seemed kind of baffled that what they had done was wrong, as if they didn’t know that it constituted plagiarism and/or as if they had done the copying and pasting totally unthinkingly. This fit with the fact that the rest of their tests were quite good – there was no need for these students to cheat out of fear of failing. It seems that, in today’s internet culture, it didn’t even occur to them that there could be anything wrong with the casual, undocumented use of online sources.

I was, and continue to be, torn about what to do in these cases. On the one hand, I did plainly forbid the use of other sources in the test’s instructions. Taking a test constitutes tacit consent to its terms, and I would have been well within my rights to give the students a zero on the test, or worse.

On the other hand, though, I’m sympathetic to these students on account of the fact that they appear not ever to have had a respect for academic honesty and a crippling fear of accidental plagiarism instilled into them. Babies don’t pop out knowing about plagiarism, after all. Given the sorry state of education, many of my students probably never learned about plagiarism – what counts as plagiarism, how to cite things properly, what the consequences of committing it can be. And if they didn’t have the relevant knowledge, then there is a case to be made that they are less than fully responsible for their acts of plagiarism.

On the other hand (you have three hands, right?), a lack of knowledge concerning plagiarism doesn’t immediately imply that these students have no responsibility for their acts. They could be responsible for not taking the initiative to learn about plagiarism on their own, such as by reading the whole student handbook or the materials made available on the school’s library’s website. This is a kind of second-order responsibility; failing to take these steps reveals a blameworthy deficit of concern for the academic terms to which one has agreed and amounts to a form of negligence.

Furthermore, a lack of knowledge concerning plagiarism also doesn’t immediately imply that the students ought not to be punished for acts of plagiarism. Punishments, blameworthiness, and responsibility are interrelated in complicated and controversial ways. Sometimes there are prudential or moral reasons not to punish someone who is responsible for a bad act and blameworthy for it (punishment would be too expensive, or the person is now old and sickly, or not punishing the person would somehow or other maximize utility). And sometimes there are prudential or moral reasons to punish someone who was not fully responsible for a bad act, and/or who is not properly blameworthy for it. In the plagiarism case, it’s very difficult to tell who did or didn’t know what constitutes plagiarism or that plagiarism is wrong. Maybe it is better to send a message that there is “zero tolerance” for plagiarism of any kind – willful, ignorant, or willfully ignorant. This has the added benefit of saving teachers all the time and trouble of deliberating endlessly about the particulars of a plagiarism incident.

Yet, I remain undecided on this kind of case. Plagiarism is obviously unacceptable, but the circumstances surrounding can differ widely and seem to matter. I hope that in the future, I either never encounter plagiarism again (fat chance) or that it is so egregious that I can punish it without qualms (but isn’t that kind of a weird thing to hope for?)

The fluid, fluctuating nature of online communication makes it hard to consistently define and uphold academic honesty. It’s hard to define what respect of intellectual property looks like on a blog, for example, or a website, or a MySpace page.

Should all bloggers be required to use MLA citations when they quote a fellow blogger? Do permalinks make it acceptable to reproduce an entire post or article on your own site? What about images?

These questions can be overwhelming. One of the dangers of online communication is that too much information–and too little–can lead to carelessness and apathy. “No one told me I had to cite that image from Google Images. There’s no guide for quoting a website on another website, so I didn’t bother.”

Personal responsibility is out of vogue in our era. We like step-by-step instructions, and if the warning label “hot” isn’t on the cup of coffee, we have every right to legal restitution.

I am as guilty as the next person. In writing this blog, I have attempted to develop my own system of ethical use guidelines for quoting and “borrowing” others’ content. When I quote a blog or online article, I use the “blockquote” feature, and I include a permalink to the source. When I use an image to supplement my text, I link the image back to its source rather than to my site.

Is that the best way to do it? Probably not. Could I do more? Yes. Should I? I’m not sure. But am I freed of responsibility because there is no one right way to do it? Absolutely not.

Cracking down on Internet piracy and protecting copyrights have cost the writing, publishing, film making, and music industries enormous effort, and have done little to stem the flood. Smart people circumvent the system every day. Smart people will continue to find new ways around the new protections designed by other smart people.

The only way that real change will occur is when smart people take responsibility and choose to be honest people.

Unfortunately, if that sounds over-simplified, it is. Our postmodern view that all ethical systems are equal has made it easy to justify downloading pirated music (“Hey, I wasn’t the one who posted it!”) or leaving out the quotations marks once in a while (“It’s only Wikipedia; I could have written the same thing.”).

It’s a slippery spiral, isn’t it?

Relativism is only attractive until someone else’s ethical system interferes with us; until we write something and see it spread over the Web without our permission; until we cry “not fair” and no one listens.

So where do we go from here?

In blogging, just as much as in college classrooms, I think it is worth considering what honesty means, on what it is based, and how we erode it, or build it up, in each choice we make and webpage we open.

Two things have come to light in the past couple of weeks regarding academic honesty in the U.S.  One is the Chicago Tribune’s expose on the University of Illinois at Campaign-Urbana (the state’s main campus) admitting students because they have political supporters, rather than on the basis of merit.

The other is that William Meehan, the President of Jacksonville State University, plagiarized much of his dissertation.

What is disturbing about Meehan’s plagiarism of Carl Boening’s dissertation — and something that I’m not the first to notice — is that both men wrote their dissertations for a Doctorate in Education at the University of Alabama, within three years of each other (1996 and 1999).  Not only that, they SHARED COMMITTEE MEMBERS, specifically Michael T. Miller, now of the University of Arkansas (who was chair of BOTH their dissertation committees) and the late Harold Bishop.  In other words, these two men supposedly read, critiqued and commented on drafts of both these dissertations, but didn’t notice that they were largely the same document.

I would be embarrassed to have signed off on a dissertation without noticing something so glaring.  This not only brings Meehan’s reputation into question, but unfortunately also those of Drs. Miller and Bishop.  While dissertation committees should not be expected to turn graduate work into turnitin.com, and it is well known that committee members often don’t have the time to read every word of their students’ dissertations (that is a structural problem involving what is expected from academics and what they can reasonably do), it seems that members of this committee should have noticed something so obvious and done something about it.

In fact, this should have been caught at the stage of formulating a dissertation project.  If a doctorate is supposed to add to a discipline’s body of knowledge, students should be encouraged to avoid projects that are too similar to others completed so recently, unless they truly have a different take on the material.

The larger point I want to make, however, is that these kinds of scandals do more than anger those of us who wrote our own dissertations and who have the unpleasant task of punishing undergraduates who plagiarize.  They affect the reputations of others associated with these institutions.  It’s one thing to write a mediocre dissertation; it’s another for others to have to wonder whether U. of Alabama doctorates wrote their own work (and I assume that most of them do).  It’s one thing to not be the best student to ever grace UIUC; it’s another for people to have to wonder whether anyone with a connection to someone in state politics is only there because they pulled strings (as this letter points out).

This is not just about who is accepted to these institutions, but what it means to have graduated from them.  In academia, much of the legitimacy of our work rides on the integrity of our scholarly communities — our students, our department, our university, our alums.  Those who throw that honesty into question should expect consequences, and those who value the reputation of their institutions should take action.  In the end, our reputation as scholars is the most valuable thing we have.

Not so, says Thomas Bartlett of the Chronicle of Higher Education in an article on March 20, 2009. While many professors are aware of different services that help students write their papers for them, they may not be aware that it is a profitable and global industry they are up against.

These companies called essay mills write custom papers for students who pay per-page, and avoid software like Turnitin because the essays are original works; they just aren’t created by the student. The Chronicle tracked one of these companies, Best Essays, from Virginia to Ukraine to the Philippines, back to the US.
John Gordon of Future Tense interviewed Bartlett about the story on March 27 and it is well-worth the four minutes to listen.

What is a professor to do?  Solutions using technology can help but as Bartlett concludes, having a relationship with the student and their work is still the best deterrent.

Take a moment to drink these images in:

There are many directions I could go with this. I could talk about the slap in the face it is to my friends, the former staff of MKE.  I could call the photographer who stole the  two-year-old idea a hack (oh, wait, I already did that on Facebook). I could offer my suggestions of how Milwaukee Magazine could make amends. I could be on gmail sending off indignant emails, but instead at this moment I am thinking about how an important part of my job is to convince my students that plagiarism is wrong and that academic and professional dishonesty are terrains they don’t want to explore. But then something like this happens. A few months ago, the Shepherd Express put a photograph on their cover that had been an MKE cover. There were no repercussions, acknowledgements or apologies. And I can’t help but wonder if Milwaukee Magazine will make a statement, offer an apology. If only for the symbol of what’s right, maybe they’ll demand the freelance pay back from Christopher Bluhm and send a fair check to the members of the art department from MKE for the use of their intellectual property.

I’ve sent these pics to my students for discussion, but now I’m wondering if I’ve simply shown them yet another example of how so-called professionals steal from each other with no ramifications. And I’m a little irritated by that.

1. What does good MYP practice look like? (Published on the OCC: 11/08/2008)

Excellent MYP teaching and learning can take many forms. It is difficult to appreciate the complexities and contexts of MYP units through brief video clips, but the three videos on the Online Curriculum Centre aim to show examples of what good practice can look like.

Of particular interest in these three videos is the use of Visible Thinking routines as developed by Harvard Project Zero. These routines can be developed as part of an ATL programme used by teachers in all subjects to make thinking more visible and to increase student engagement. The three classes are as follows.

Mathematics:  MYP 2 (grade 7)– Comparing and scaling
French B:  MYP 1 (Grade 6)– Media
Humanities/science: MYP 1 (grade 6)– Change over time

To view these videos, got to the MYP mathematics page, language B page and the humanities and sciences pages. The video clips are in the list of MYP publications under the heading MYP Practice. You will need to use your OCC user login.

I realize that the Internet speed at school is very slow at present so I advise teachers to visit these fantastic resources wherever you can find a high speed internet connection in Bali! Please do so.

1. Academic Honesty:

Zero for the entire work if there is ANY plagiarism- we have turnitin.com- Kathryn Bruce will be happy to walk anyone interested through that- it is an online plagiarism detection engine. Please read page 19 of the BIS Parent/Student handbook for 2008-2009. We must be vigilant in the way in which we deal with this matter. Students are taught bibliography and quoting skills- these are reinforced by not accepting any work that has any plagiarism.

1. Interdisciplinary units

The simplest IDUs are created when one teacher talks to another- the beauty of our size is that this can easily over lunch or tea! Go ahead- talk to someone about your wonderful ideas! If you really do prefer avoiding human contact- have fun snooping around other teachers’ planning on Atlas for exciting interdisciplinary ideas. These can be simple and effective.

1. Moderation for the June 2009 session

If you are giving clear information at the start of an assessment task, such as assessment criteria, objectives, timeline, in class support, drafting opportunities etc by way of a handout- you will find it very helpful keeping a copy of those instructions for inclusion when preparing an excellent background folder for moderation.

I would like to have all moderation samples submitted to me by 16 March 2009 (This is the day after the Ides of March, an easy date to remember- Galungan (first one for 2009) is on 18 March). These samples will need to be in the mail by 31 March 2009.

Thank you

Werner Paetzold

MYP Coordinator

Texas A&M International University in Laredo fired a professor for publishing the names of students accused of plagiarism.

In his syllabus, professor Loye Young wrote that he would “promptly and publicly fail and humiliate anyone caught lying, cheating or stealing.” After he discovered six students had plagiarized on an essay, Young posted their names on his blog, resulting in his firing last week.

“It’s really the only way to teach the students that it’s inappropriate,” he said.

Young, a former adjunct professor of management information systems, said he believes he made the right move. He said trials are public for a reason, and plagiarism should be treated the same way. He added that exposing cheaters is an effective deterrent.

“They were told the consequences in the syllabus,” he said. “They didn’t believe it.”

Young was fired for violating FERPA. Young, and some of the commenters at the original article, don’t seem to understand the idea that a syllabus is not a legally-binding contract, and a course syllabus cannot overrule Federal law. So it doesn’t really matter whether he had this public humiliation clause in the syllabus or whether the students read it. Choosing not to drop a course does not amount to acquiescing to the syllabus policies if those policies are illegal. You might as well say that cheaters will be shot on sight and then claim immunity from assault charges for putting a cap in a plagiarizing student, because after all the student knew the consequences.

There’s also a sort of moral issue here too. Young lost his job because what he did violates FERPA. But if there were no FERPA, would it be OK to publicly humiliate a student who had been determined — let’s say beyond a reasonable doubt — to be guilty of cheating?

UPDATE: Young’s blog no longer has the offending article on it, but he has this response to TAMIU in which he claims he “analyzed FERPA at the department chair’s request” before posting the article, submitted his analysis to the university, and got no indication that his analysis was incorrect.

You must write up each problem solution by yourself without assistance, however, even if you collaborate with others to solve the problem. You are asked on problem sets to identify your collaborators. If you did not work with anyone, you should write “Collaborators: none.” If you obtain a solution through research (e.g., on the Web), acknowledge your source, but write up the solution in your own words. It is a violation of this policy to submit a problem solution that you cannot orally explain to a member of the course staff. [Emphasis in the original]

So in other words, you can collaborate within reasonable boundaries as long as you cite your collaborators, but you must write up work on your own. Normal stuff for a syllabus. But what I love is the last sentence. If the professor or a TA believes that you didn’t really write up the work yourself, they can ask you to stand and deliver via an oral explanation of what you turned in. And if you can’t orally explain, on the spot, what you did to the satisfaction of the course staff, then the presumption is that you cheated.  That’s a brilliant way to ensure students understand what they are doing, and expecting students to be able to do this oral explanation is absolutely reasonable for university-level upper-division work.

Maybe everybody does this already; I’ll be building that into my syllabus for Linear Algebra next semester.

The overall strategy for dealing with academic dishonesty is that the students involved should be confronted with the issue promptly after it’s been discovered, given a chance to give their side of the story, and then the professor can move forward on the dual basis of the evidence in front of her/him and the student’s own statements. This strategy is opposed to two other possible strategies: 

• Avoiding doing anything about the academic dishonesty at all, either by simply looking the other way and pretending it didn’t happen, or else using the suspected academic dishonesty as an occasion to give an alternate exam or some kind of second chance assessment. I’m not against second chances or mercy in general, but look: academic honesty is bad. It’s more than just youthful indiscretion, like drinking too much at a frat party or sleeping through an exam because you were up all night studying (or drinking too much at a frat party). Academic dishonesty is a willful, intentional violation of trust, and if you are a professor and have a shred of respect for the life of the mind, you have to do something about it, even if it might earn you a reputation as a mean SOB among students. (This goes double for new faculty, for whom academic dishonesty is often perpetrated by students as a means of testing boundaries.) 
• Executing a summary judgment on the basis of evidence alone, without the students giving their side of things, even if you are within your rights as a prof to do so and even if the evidence for academic dishonesty is overwhelming. First of all, I’ve had many cases of something I thought was academic dishonesty that could be logically explained away by students when I confront them with the work; or at least, I could see that the student was so scared and authentically sorry that I can at least scale my recommendation for their punishment back a little. Second, many times students will simply confess when they are confronted. 

I bring this up because of virusdoc’s comment, just made on an old post: 

Resurrecting an old thread, but I just graded my first ever take-home essay test (open-book, open web, but no collaboration allowed and students were instructed to make sure their ideas and words were their own).

Out of 30 tests graded thus far, there were two students who boldly copied and pasted huge blocks of text from multiple websites into their test answers, without so much as an attempt to change any words or even alter the font from that in the website. It was horrific. In addition, I uncovered one clear example of two students who almost certainly shared answers. One of them had screwball, left-field answers for two questions in a row, using examples that weren’t in our text and I hadn’t discussed in lecture. This was odd, but I dismissed it as a singularity. Several tests later, another student used exactly the same screwball examples for the same two questions. (no other student has used these examples). Further comparison of the two students’ tests side by side reveals multiple verbatim quotes in their answers, and several of the answers that are not verbatim are structurally highly related.

I never anticipated senior level students would a) cheat so frequently, and b) do so in such stupid, obvious ways.

Yee-ha for higher ed!

Yep. I’m actually a little (pleasantly) surprised that I haven’t had a clear-cut incident of academic dishonesty yet in my own courses this semester. But that could be because I’ve taken to designing my courses specifically to avoid assessments with a high risk of cheating or plagiarism. I have very little in the way of take-home assignments that are worth very much.

That doesn’t seem right for higher education. Profs ought to be giving assignments that are challenging, engaging, and therefore take time and effort outside of class. But when we do that, there’s all this rampant and ridiculous cheating that takes place. So we profs feel this intrinsic pressure to make most of our grades come from timed assessments which are easier to manage, but which by definition operate at a lower cognitive level than the kinds of assignments we would like to give (and which college students ought to be getting). So cheaters and plagiarists are ruining not only their own education, but the education of others as well. 

When the prof got the assignments back, guess what he discovered? That’s right: One of the students had plagiarized his plagiarism assignment.

As some great mind once said, there’s a fine line between stupid and clever. 

So typically I’ve given such problems out as homework, with the instructions that students may work together on understanding the problem and drafting up a sketch of the solution (Polya’s stages 1 and 2) but the main solution itself, as well as any reality-checking, has to be done individually.

This article from the Harvard Crimson from a year ago captures exactly what I wish this process would look like on the students’ level. The article is about Math 55, called “probably the most difficult undergraduate math class in the country”. How do these students handle the homework in this class, which is assigned frequently and hits like a ton of bricks?

Georges Bizet’s Carmen blares from the computer of Menyoung Lee ’10. The boys sit scattered around their gray worktable, their eyes telltale red and fingers sore from countless hours at their laptops, dutifully LaTeXing problem sets. They have been here since 2 p.m. and will work for almost 12 straight hours to complete the problem set due the following day.

As the hours pass, they discuss the problem set. They formalize and write the solutions on their own for academic integrity. Despite the class’s cutthroat stereotype, this session is about community, not competition. [emph. added]

They work hard as a group — they have to — but when it comes time to actually write the solution, they voluntarily break off to work the solution out on their own, because they have a sense of academic integrity. It’s a community, but not a commune. Nobody is taking anybody else’s work and turning it in as their own, because I suppose they have pride in their work and in their abilities. As far as I can tell there are no timed assessments in Math 55 to hold them individually accountable.

I wouldn’t want my Geometry and Algebra classes to be as hard as Math 55, but I’d love it if students would have a solid sense of the correct point when working together on problems needs to stop and individual work needs to begin, and then make that switch from group to individual work as a matter of personal ethics and an understanding of what it means to learn a subject.  And I’d love not to have to shift assessment of problem-solving over to timed tests as a result.

Do students in high school and certain college courses where group work is stressed more and more frequently understand that this point exists?