Dear Editor,

The Guardian has done a great disservice to the UCSD academic community with Michelle Chin’s March 9 article and its lurid headline: ‘In Effort to Stop Cheating, Process Cheats Students.’ I write as someone who served a three year stint (2005-08) as a standing member of the Academic Dishonesty Hearing Board, during which I participated in many dozens of cases. The article does not accurately describe the process that I came to know. In these inquiries, the panel ‘mdash; consisting of faculty, undergraduates and graduate students, in meetings that were chaired by deans from the colleges ‘mdash; deliberated long and hard about every case. Accused students, usually accompanied by student advocates, were given every opportunity to present their sides of the issue. Those bringing the charges were always made to prove their case, usually with considerable printed material, and often with witnesses. And although, according to the rules, only a majority of the panel is needed to decide a case, in my experience the verdicts, guilty or not, were almost always unanimous.

Cheating is not a ‘victimless crime.’ Those who are hurt are the honest majority of students whose standing will always be penalized in a grade-conscious society. As is true on all college campuses, cheating does occur at UCSD. Finding fair and honest ways to deal with it has been a chronic problem since the campus’s founding. The current approach has been a distinct improvement over the situation of just a few years ago. In my judgment, the present academic integrity coordinator, Tricia Bertram Gallant, is doing an outstanding job and deserves the praise of the student body, not scurrilous comments from the A.S. Office of Student Advocacy.