Student academic misconduct, more commonly known as
cheating, is not a problem unique to UCSD. During the 2006-07 academic school
year, 342 allegations were made against students for cheating — a number which
Academic Integrity Coordinator Tricia Bertram-Gallant said, “is probably less
than 1 percent [of students who actually cheat.]”
Despite cheating’s severity, the annual number of
allegations has been consistent for the past few years.
UCSD policy outlines several different types of academic
misconduct that students can commit. In the 2006-07 academic year, 31 percent
of cases were plagiarism and 27 percent were the use of unauthorized aids; the
remaining percentage was broken up into three categories: unauthorized
collaboration, falsification/fabrication and fraud. More specifically, of the
342 allegations, 30 percent of the cases were linked to general education
college writing programs.
“Catching someone who cheats has always been difficult in
courses which rely on writing,” Thurgood Marshall College Dimensions of Culture
professor Nancy Gilson said. “Before [the Web site Turnitin.com], we had to
rely on our own knowledge of both the literature in a field and our sense of
what typical writing at a certain stage of university sounded like. We catch a
pretty consistent number of students. It surprises me, actually. Turnitin.com
makes it very difficult to cheat.”
Depending on the form of misconduct, a student’s punishment
can consist of attending a workshop about academic dishonesty to suspension or
expulsion.
According to Bertram-Gallant, the punishment depends on the
severity of the crime. If a student committed an academic misconduct that can
be defined as fraud, which includes practices such as using another person to
complete an exam, acquiring a solutions manual or exam from a publisher or
professor, or submitting entire purchased papers, then the student could face a
quarter or year suspension or even expulsion.
Last year, 54 percent of students who admitted that they
cheated were assigned to a workshop, 19 percent
faced quarter-long suspensions and 3 percent faced longer suspensions or
were permanently dismissed from the university.
According to Bertram-Gallant, cheating occurs more often at
UCSD than other colleges in the area, mostly because UCSD’s quarter system
offers more classes and therefore more instances of cheating. However, Gilson
attributes increased cheating to higher competition at universities.
“My experience in the last few years is that the competition
in school, at high school and university, is so stiff that getting anything
less than an A is unacceptable,” Gilson said. “Most students do not set out to
cheat; it happens at a moment of panic when they believe that what they have
done on their own is not going to measure up. Many of them rationalize that
using ideas from someone else or words or sentences from Wikipedia is not
cheating. It’s on the Web, that makes it public domain, yes? Well, no. But then
the damage is done.”
Another common form of academic misconduct is the use of
unauthorized materials such as cheat sheets, or using old lab reports, papers
or exams to aid in the completion of a students’ homework — methods that
Bertram-Gallant said are commonly perceived as less severe than more blatant
types of misconduct.
“If the instructor hasn’t assigned the use of it, then it is
considered cheating,” Bertram-Gallant said. “My ethics [are], if a professor is
standing over your shoulder, would you still be doing it? If no, then it would
be cheating. If a student has access to previous exams, they shouldn’t use it
unless they ask the professor.”
However, there tends to be a fine line between authorized
and unauthorized aids. Organizations such as A.S. Lecture Notes must acquire
the permission of a professor before providing lecture notes for classes. Art
history professor Teri Sowell endorses A.S. Lecture Notes because she feels
that students can focus their attention on larger concepts rather than trying
to write down her lectures verbatim.
“Students may not understand what is important during the
lecture, so they try to record everything I say,” she said. “It detaches them.
If they can rely on good lecture notes, they can spend more time digesting and
applying the material. I do not notice a big attendance drop in classes that
have an A.S. note taker. Notes can only record so much and I doubt anyone could
get an A in my class without understanding the classroom nuances that do not
get recorded in published notes.”
Yet not all professors feel this way. Political science
professor Keith Poole does not like the use of A.S. lecture notes in his
classes.
“I allowed the note taker to do it once in one of my classes
and have not done it since,” he said. “I do not think that students can learn
anything if they can buy notes.”
According to Bertram-Gallant, because many students attend
graduate school after UCSD, there isn’t a competition between students, but a
competition within themselves. Rather than contending against one another, the
students are helping each other cheat, she said.
“A lot of kids come into university with better-than-perfect
GPAs,” she said. “So students think that they are better-than-perfect, which
has many psychological effects. Think about how devastating that A-minus
becomes. It’s a competition against the system, because the system has made
grades so important for future successes.”
Bertram-Gallant said that issues with academic integrity
aren’t just threatened by students who cheat, but also by students who keep
quiet when they see others cheating, which has a negative long-term effect.
“Professors assign grades in order to assign different
levels of competence,” she said. “Students who are peeved that other students
are cheating are silent; they just let it happen. Then it becomes normative,
then the UCSD diploma becomes worthless.”
Despite concerns associated with the violation of academic
integrity, UCSD has not done any anonymous surveys regarding academic
misconduct. Thus, there is no way of knowing how many students are engaging in
behaviors that would be considered cheating. Bertram-Gallant said that having
this data would be very helpful for UCSD, but in the meantime, the only
statistics available are on the cases of academic misconduct that are being
reported.
“A cheater doesn’t just hurt themselves, in fact, they
benefit themselves,” she said. “But they hurt everyone else — even those who
don’t cheat.”
