Eleanor Roosevelt College recorded the highest number of academic dishonesty cases among the colleges in the 2002-03 academic year, A.S. Commissioner of Student Advocacy Jeff Boyd reported on April 21. According to Boyd, the high number of cases resulted from the use of online plagiarism prevention service Turnitin.com and a zero-tolerance policy in its required Making of the Modern World classes. ERC accounted for 97 of the 210 cases handled at UCSD last year, representing 46 percent of the total. No other college recorded more than 42 cases.
“The problem is that ERC has a zero tolerance policy for cheating,” Boyd said. “So I think there were a lot of cases that were prosecuted unfairly. There are mistakes that happen at Turnitin.com and the MMW policy needs to reflect that.”
According to Boyd, the typical result of an academic dishonesty case is academic probation until graduation, an ethics workshop, an F on the paper and possibly an F in the course.
Turnitin.com works by comparing a student’s work with a database of previously submitted student work and by searching the Web for strings of words contained in a paper. In classes that use the service, all students are required to submit their work to the Web site for evaluation. Instructors are then notified if any of the words or sentences in the assignment match another student’s writing or a published work.
Boyd was also concerned about intellectual property rights issues, claiming that students who use the service may lose their intellectual property rights over the work or have their privacy compromised.
Officials at Turnitin.com could not be reached for comment by press time.
The use of Turnitin.com, however, has been evaluated and approved by the UCSD Office of Student Policies and Judicial Affairs. The Turnitin.com Web site states that it complies with the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act and maintains students’ intellectual property.
ERC officials defended their policy, citing the importance of rigorous academic standards and the establishment of a new program to help students understand proper citation methods.
“It’s a challenging issue in that we want to make sure that students are engaging in appropriate academic practices, that they are developing the skills so that they can be contributors to the academy in their own way, and that they appreciate what the fundamental tenets of higher education are,” ERC Dean of Student Affairs Patricia Scott said.
Scott also believes that part of the discrepancy arises from the nature of the writing assignments given in MMW. According to Scott and MMW Program Assistant Director Jacqueline Giordano, the focus on research papers, as opposed to more writing-oriented programs in other colleges, lends itself more to academic dishonesty. ERC also has the longest core sequence of all colleges, with six required quarters of MMW, resulting in a larger number of students in the core sequence at any one time.
“We knew that there was a lot of concern about this,” Giordano said. “Bear in mind that our assignments are different. There is a greater potential for ‘borrowing’ from Web sites or somewhere else [if you’re writing a research paper] than if you’re writing an analysis.”
Scott said that ERC’s policy was re-evaluated between the fall and winter quarters of the 2003-04 academic year, resulting in changes in the types of cases that would be forwarded from the program for adjudication. According to Giordano, positive matches that are the result of carelessness and demonstrate no intent to plagiarize are now generally not referred to the dean or recorded in a student’s permanent record.
“I am very confident that the academic coordinators who are affiliated with the MMW program have been extremely thorough and take their responsibility very seriously because they understand the importance of an allegation of academic misconduct and how it can [impact] a student’s future,” Scott said.
