Catching cheaters, like fighting grade inflation, requires a large amount of a faculty member's time and energy, and because the promotion, tenure, and salary system of the research university never rewards a professor for detecting a student plagiarist, or any other species of academic thief, why would a faculty member spend precious minutes, hours, even days or weeks in this endeavor (tracking down the exact source of a plagiarized paper can be a trek across a desert)? Moreover, apprehending the cheater is merely the first step in a very laborious process: countless reports to fill out, many faculty and student disciplinary committees at which to appear and present the evidence in the case, and always the threat of the accused student suing the accuser.
If grading student work puts faculty on the path of least resistance,
resulting in grade inflation, then discovering a plagiarist or exam cheater often triggers a sprint down that path. As the southern professor told the
Chronicle of Higher Education
, exposing a cheater is not worth “the anxiety or aggravation” or time. Therefore, the best course of action is to do nothing. But what happens to faculty whoâout of pride, honesty, or perversityâtry to expose a cheater?
Many faculty members interviewed for this book on this issue told a horror story about a professor who accumulated lots of evidence of a particular student's cheating, then reported the student's dishonesty to the proper university authorities. After a year of hearings before various university judicial groups and no judgments, the student sued the accuser. The professor's school provided no legal aid for him or her; then, in a triumph of Johnnie Cochranâlike lawyering, the student got off scot-free, and the professor had to pay exorbitant court costs and damages. He or she was financially and emotionally ruined by the case.
Faculty repeated versions of this anecdote so oftenâusually with the besieged professor as “a colleague of a friend at another university”âthat the tale took on the character of an urban legend. A few cases like the professor's have occurred, although never in this extreme form, but the accuracy of the story is much less important than the fact that so many faculty members believe it and invoke it as a reason for doing nothing about student cheating.
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Even professors who actually want to combat cheating discover that their universities will not help them in this endeavor. James Karge-Taylor teaches a lecture course in the history of jazz at the University of Arizona, and, in 1998, he discovered in a poll in his class that, of the 368 enrolled students, 25 percent had cheated on the first quiz. He had a simple request of his school, “I would like more help reading papers.” Apparently help never arrived. A late-1999 article about websites selling papers for students to submit as their own work mentioned: “The paper mills are keeping customers happy. Tim, a University of Arizona senior who buys around four papers a semester, recalls ordering an essay on Louis Armstrong [for a jazz lecture class] ⦠. Five minutes later, he got a call from the company urging him to reconsider. One of his schoolmates had already ordered the same paper.”
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Nevertheless, in the bleak research university landscape, some faculty members at Big-time U's manage to prevent cheating and plagiarism in their courses. However, their methods are very labor intensive. An Indiana University professor puts the following note in all of his course syllabi:
A warning on original work vs. plagiarism
An experienced teacher can easily tell the difference between original student writing and plagiarized work. Because you will have to write various exercises in class, I will have an excellent idea of your true writing abilities. Thus, when you turn in your major papers in the course, your writingâalthough more careful and polished than your in-class workâwill still reflect your abilities. Your writing is like your signature, unique to you. To turn in someone else's writingâprofessional critic, friend, tutor, website doofus, etc.âis foolish, easily recognized, an insult to your instructor and fellow students, and a good way to get yourself into serious trouble.
NOTE: When you turn in your major papers in this course, you must also turn in your original notes, outlines, and draftsâbe sure to print out the drafts after you do them. I will not accept a major paper without this material (it helps me gauge the quality of your research as well as the amount of work that you put into the paper).
This instructor admits that he would not know what to do if a student actually turned in a plagiarized paper, but, fortunately, he has not discovered one since he added these paragraphs to his syllabi many years ago. Admittedly, his teaching methods are time-consuming-he has to read all of his students' in-class and out-of-class workâbut he believes that this is the only way to teach people to become better writers.
In addition, he finds that requiring “notes, outlines, and drafts” is a useful pedagogical device, and one that also short-circuits plagiarism. The instructor remarked, “The plagiarist would have to deconstruct the bought or stolen finished product into draft, outline, and note form. He or she would learn far more about writing from doing this than writing the paper straight.”
This instructor is not a typical faculty member at a major research university. Some of his colleagues at Indiana and other Big-time U's also try to prevent cheatingâbut mainly with seating strategies in lecture halls, such as handing out various versions of the scantron exam so that no student sits next to another student with the same version of the exam. However, the new cellular phone technologies tend to defeat these strategies.
Similarly, some faculty have embraced the new anti-plagiarism search engines on the web. In theory, they take a suspect paper and locate the original already posted somewhere on the web. In practice, as a reporter discovered, the search engines “fail to detect [papers] ⦠with even the slightest amount of rewriting,” and, more to the point, they can only find
papers listed in html and free to all (many of which are atrociously written). The anti-plagiarism engines cannot penetrate websites that require passwords, i.e., those that sell excellent recycled essays or, for a fairly high price, that supply an original paper to clients. Therefore, the best antidote to plagiarism on the web remains a teacher who requires writing in class and knows his or her students and their work well.
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At a time when many universities tolerate student cheating, some institutions have gone a step further and have created a culture where staff members write the papers and take-home exams for some undergraduates, particularly intercollegiate athletes. A national magazine remarked:
Sometimes the schools are directly responsible [for cheating] ⦠. A former tutor for the University of Minnesota revealed that she had written 400 papers for 20 [varsity men's] basketball players between 1993 and 1998.
The University of Minnesota academic cheating scandal was large in scale but not exceptional in occurrence. Indeed, athletic department tutors at every NCAA Division I school have approached or crossed the line between tutoring a student and actually doing some of the student's course work. For example, in helping an athlete correct writing errors, the tutor rewrites the entire paper, and then the jock submits it as his or her own work; or, in typing a paper for an athlete, the tutor makes so many changes and corrections that the final productâsubmitted as the jock's original workâis, at best, a collaborative effort, and more often a ghost-written one.
In the Minnesota academic cheating scandal, three tutors, encouraged and rewarded by athletic department officials, brazenly composed whole papers and answered take-home exams for many basketball players, sometimes on subjects about which the athletes knew nothing, and in polished prose that some of these academically challenged jocks were incapable of writing. Not surprisingly, faculty members receiving these papers and exams were suspicious, but, in true Big-time U fashion, they ignored the alarm bells and graded the papers as if they were original student work.
However, one assistant professor did complain to University of Minnesota authorities. He pointed out that in one of his courses, basketball “star forward Courtney James had [recently] turned in a paper that was the best he [the instructor] had seen in his nearly forty years at the university,” and
that he clearly “suspected academic fraud.” Nevertheless, Minnesota administrators would not investigate or support the instructor, and so he gave the paper and the player a passing grade.
Eventually, due to the competitive nature of the two daily newspapers in the area, the details of academic fraud in the men's basketball program at Minnesota emerged, including this assistant professor's experiences. UM administrators then pledged a total cleanupâas they had after every public revelation in the long history of UM athletic department scandals. Yet, NCAA officials called the recent UM incident an idiosyncratic event; in reality, many tutors at other Big-time U's could tell the press about academic dishonesty in their athletic departments (unfortunately, these revelations rarely emerge because most college towns have only a single daily newspaper, resting snugly in the local athletic department's pocket, and the paper refuses to investigate the U's college sports program or listen to tutors brave or foolhardy enough to come forward).
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Finally, however, it is important to take a step back and to place athletic department malfeasanceânot only academic fraud but also cheating in recruiting and retention of athletesâwithin the context of the entire university. The Carnegie Foundation noted that:
The tragedy is that the cynicism that stems from the abuses in athletics infects the rest of student life, from promoting academic dishonesty to the loss of individual ideals. We find it disturbing that students who admit to cheating often excuse their conduct as being set by college examples such as athletic dishonesty.
Interviews for this book and P.S comments on the questionnaire support this Carnegie comment. A surprising number of students, particularly male sports fans, justified their academic dishonesty by referring to college coaches who cheated to win or ignored illegal off-the-field conduct by their players so that the offending athletes could remain on the team and help it win. During fall 1999, many students cited Peter Warrick's involvement in a shoplifting incident at Florida State, for example, “Hey, this All-American thief [Warrick] should be in the slammer, not leading the 'Noles to the national football championship. When King Bobby [Bowden, FSU coach] lets his jocks cheat like this, why should Joe Blow college student act differently?”
In addition, the student sports fans, unlike those undergraduates who regarded cheating as “an insult for an insult,” tended to see it as an element
in “the game of going to college,” a contest that they were determined to win “by any means necessary” (the two phrases kept recurring). These students are only one cohortâalbeit a rapidly growing oneâof the undergraduate population, but their attitudes definitely contribute to the general cynicism of the student body. As do the unethical coaches and the never-ending scandals in intercollegiate athletics.
An undergraduate at Indiana University suggested a survey question to probe the connections between student cheating and college sports:
A star athlete at your school asks you to help him/her cheat on an important exam. A passing grade in this course will determine whether the athlete remains eligible to play or not. Would you help the athlete cheat? If not, what would you do (turn the athlete in, etc.)?
The question was included in the survey and produced interesting results. At schools with Division I college sports programs, 59 percent of the respondents said that they would help the athlete cheat, men outnumbering women in positive assent almost two to one. Of the 41 percent no vote, a large majority came from women. However, on the second part of the questionâ“what would you do (turn the athlete in, etc.)?”â84 percent of respondents at Division I schools said they would not turn the athlete in, and only 16 percent said they would. (This statistic parallels a
U.S. News
poll finding that only 18 percent of their responding students said that they would “turn in a classmate” who is cheating.)
Of equal interest were the written responses prompted by the question. A typical yes explanation from a male student was: “Cheating is o.k. If I have the answers to the exam, sure I'll give them to a star jock.” Other males explained with versions of the following: “I'd help. It's not hurting me,” and: “No big deal here. I'd tell him, âLet's go for it.'” However, more nurturing and judicious yesses came from some females. One wrote:
I would help the athlete prepare for the exam but probably wouldn't help him cheat in it. Unless he was the absolute star of the teamâthen I'd first make him sign lots of stuff for my kid brother. But I'd never turn him in.
The no answers held some surprises, but rather than showing student idealism, they usually revealed cynicism. A large number of males replied with a version of this response: “No, I won't help. Why bother? If he flunks the class, you better believe he'll still remain eligible.” Some males, particularly
at Sunbelt football schools, replied with versions of this formulation, “No. I'd tell the athlete no-can-do, but I sure wouldn't turn him in for fear of being assaulted by the student population.” However, in a more ethical and emphatic refusal, an intercollegiate athlete wrote: