Academic Honesty - An Article Response

In discussing the different aspects of cheating, I believe an important first step is to define the topic we are to discuss. Cheating can be viewed in a variety of ways; however, it has a specific definition in our context. A fitting definition for cheating is as follows –

1. Taking credit for information, material, or ideas that are not your own.
   
2. Breaking any individual classroom or overarching University rules on an assignment or exam.

Part one of the definition covers activities such as plagiarism (purposeful or inadvertent) on written assignments, using another student’s work for homework or essays, and copying another student’s answers for an exam. Part two of the definition covers activities such as using a cheat-sheet to better your score on an exam.

Donald L. McCabe discusses several different types of cheating in his article “It Takes a Village – Academic Dishonesty”. Direct cheating on an exam, plagiarism on written works, purchasing a paper through the internet, and others are all discussed. I believe that although all are clearly dishonest and wrong, there are varying degrees to which they are harmful. To copy a homework assignment from a friend may not necessarily reflect a lack of morals. It is not hard to imagine a hard working student with integrity who reads the material but forgets an assignment. That person sees a friend with the completed assignment 5 minutes before class and realizes the mistake they made and decides to copy it. Is that truly as bad as somebody who is willing to steal a copy of the test from the professor? Somebody who knowingly plagiarizes material and gives no credit? In the first example, at least consent was given by the party sharing information. In examples two and three, it is stolen.

I have personally seen many instances of cheating throughout my academic career. The most common type of cheating, in my experience, is when one student will give their homework to another student to copy before class. In many cases, students will “share” a work load. For example, three friends enrolled in the same course are each given the same three assignments. Each person will do one assignment and give it to the others to copy. There are other less common forms of cheating. They are more grievous; but I believe that unfortunately they are only less common because they are more risky, not because of their grievous nature. These include cheating on test, plagiarism, and buying essays. Common methods for cheating on tests are writing the answers on a cheat-sheet, putting the answers inside a clear pen (which when the tip is out stay hidden, but when retracted come into sight), writing the answers on the inside of a water bottle, saving files on computers that will be used to take a test, saving text files to an I-Pod, or recording MP3’s with the answers vocally expressed, then listening to the file as if it were a song on an MP3 player or CD player.

McCabe suggests several different methods to discourage academic dishonesty. Increased proctoring, using multiple versions of the exams, using plagiarism detection software and making harsher punishments are a few examples he gave. He stressed, however, that,

“…while such strategies are likely to reduce cheating, I can’t imagine many
people would want to learn in such an environment.”

He tells us, as my opinion echoes, that we are not simply trying to make students scared of being caught. Society’s goal should be to make students who are good citizens, who realize that academic integrity is a huge responsibility to uphold, and that to break the honor code is flat out wrong. If individuals govern themselves using the morals they have been taught by family, peers, and society and the morals they have shaped themselves through education, we needn’t worry about discouraging cheating in the classroom. The focus must be on cutting off the problem before it begins.

Josh Zuke

09-12-07