Is this going too far to punish and deter academic dishonesty?

Texas A&M International University in Laredo fired a professor for publishing the names of students accused of plagiarism.

In his syllabus, professor Loye Young wrote that he would “promptly and publicly fail and humiliate anyone caught lying, cheating or stealing.” After he discovered six students had plagiarized on an essay, Young posted their names on his blog, resulting in his firing last week.

“It’s really the only way to teach the students that it’s inappropriate,” he said.

Young, a former adjunct professor of management information systems, said he believes he made the right move. He said trials are public for a reason, and plagiarism should be treated the same way. He added that exposing cheaters is an effective deterrent.

“They were told the consequences in the syllabus,” he said. “They didn’t believe it.”

Young was fired for violating FERPA. Young, and some of the commenters at the original article, don’t seem to understand the idea that a syllabus is not a legally-binding contract, and a course syllabus cannot overrule Federal law. So it doesn’t really matter whether he had this public humiliation clause in the syllabus or whether the students read it. Choosing not to drop a course does not amount to acquiescing to the syllabus policies if those policies are illegal. You might as well say that cheaters will be shot on sight and then claim immunity from assault charges for putting a cap in a plagiarizing student, because after all the student knew the consequences.

There’s also a sort of moral issue here too. Young lost his job because what he did violates FERPA. But if there were no FERPA, would it be OK to publicly humiliate a student who had been determined — let’s say beyond a reasonable doubt — to be guilty of cheating?

UPDATE: Young’s blog no longer has the offending article on it, but he has this response to TAMIU in which he claims he “analyzed FERPA at the department chair’s request” before posting the article, submitted his analysis to the university, and got no indication that his analysis was incorrect.

I was just listening to the introductory lecture for an Introduction to Algorithms course at MIT, thanks to MIT Open Courseware.  The professor was reading from the syllabus on the collaboration policy for students doing homework. Here’s a piece of it:

You must write up each problem solution by yourself without assistance, however, even if you collaborate with others to solve the problem. You are asked on problem sets to identify your collaborators. If you did not work with anyone, you should write “Collaborators: none.” If you obtain a solution through research (e.g., on the Web), acknowledge your source, but write up the solution in your own words. It is a violation of this policy to submit a problem solution that you cannot orally explain to a member of the course staff. [Emphasis in the original]

So in other words, you can collaborate within reasonable boundaries as long as you cite your collaborators, but you must write up work on your own. Normal stuff for a syllabus. But what I love is the last sentence. If the professor or a TA believes that you didn’t really write up the work yourself, they can ask you to stand and deliver via an oral explanation of what you turned in. And if you can’t orally explain, on the spot, what you did to the satisfaction of the course staff, then the presumption is that you cheated.  That’s a brilliant way to ensure students understand what they are doing, and expecting students to be able to do this oral explanation is absolutely reasonable for university-level upper-division work.

Maybe everybody does this already; I’ll be building that into my syllabus for Linear Algebra next semester.

When I put up this post, highlighting a hilariously bad YouTube video on how to cheat on a test, one of the things I discovered was that there is actually an entire genre of “how to cheat” videos on YouTube. I didn’t realize I had tapped into such a resource, but I did. Since the earlier post got lots of comments, I thought I’d do another. This one is much cleverer and better-produced. Enjoy (I guess):

Like I said, a lot cleverer — and a lot harder to detect. The big hurdle here is that many classrooms don’t allow food or drink in the classroom, and even if they did, a prof could simply ban food and drink to circumvent this particular trick. But the problem there is that a student could perform this trick on anything with a label, and so if you ban pop bottles you might as well ban everything. Which some teachers and testing facilities do.

This trick also assumes that the person cheating has enough skill with Photoshop to create the fake label, and that’s a very big stretch. And if somebody is that smart then probably they don’t need to cheat in the first place.

The main problem with both this cheat and the one in the earlier post is that the cheaters are assuming something wrong about the basic nature of tests, at least at the college level. They are assuming that tests are about storage and recall of information. Maybe some (most?) tests in high school are like this. But at least in my classes, having a few bytes of information embedded into some kind of object using steganography just isn’t going to do you much good if you don’t know how to use the information to solve a problem. You might be able to smuggle in the limit definition of the derivative successfully into a calculus test, but if you can’t use the definition to calculate the derivative, that successful smuggling won’t have helped much. In that case, trying to look inconspicuous as you squint nearsightedly at your Coke bottle trying to read off the value of Planck’s constant is the least of your problems.

If these two videos are any indication of the state of the art in cheating on a test, the simplest way to foil attempts to cheat is simply to make tests less about storage and recall of information and more about problem solving and logical deduction. On final exams in my freshman courses, I allow students to make up their own notecard on the front and back of a 3×5 index card and bring it to the exam precisely because I do not want them to think that the exam is about storage and recall. “Legalizing” the cheat sheet has basically eliminated academic dishonesty from my final exams, and in fact students find that making up the card is an excellent way to review.

A far more dangerous form of cheating would be a system where a student taking a test communicates information about the test itself to another student, such as two students sharing solution techniques in real time to a problem on a test they are taking. There are ways to do this, but I haven’t seen a clever (or un-clever) video on YouTube yet about that.

OMG it’s so simple! Roll up a piece of paper with your cheat notes on it and STICK IT INSIDE A PEN! Then TRY TO READ THE TINY HANDWRITING THROUGH THE CLEAR PLASTIC during the test!

I’m sure it’s OK to immortalize dishonesty on YouTube… Because, like, NOBODY important ever checks YouTube — like teachers, employers, or The Chicago Sun-Times.

Do students really think that this works? Having a little rolled-up piece of paper with microscopic notes on so densely packed together that they threaten to collapse into a black hole, not to mention being sheathed in plastic which blurs the resolution of the notes? How could someone even find those notes legible, let alone useful?

If this young lady wants to come to my college and take a class with me and take one of my tests, I’ll look the other way if she wants to use this little pen trick, because if you haven’t learned the material, then a little rolled-up stick of notes will not do you much good. And that’s not just me and my classes. Her blog says she is going to go to a community college and get a culinary arts certificate, which makes me wonder what it would be like to be served by a chef who cheated her way all through culinary school. “Academic honesty, blah blah blah….” indeed.

Virusdoc, always the prolific commenter, has left another comment that raises the issue of how a professor should actually deal with academic dishonesty when it occurs. What follows is my own procedure for handling these situations; I’m sure it’s not perfect, and I’m open to suggestions for improvement, but it’s worked pretty well for me over the years. 

The overall strategy for dealing with academic dishonesty is that the students involved should be confronted with the issue promptly after it’s been discovered, given a chance to give their side of the story, and then the professor can move forward on the dual basis of the evidence in front of her/him and the student’s own statements. This strategy is opposed to two other possible strategies: 

• Avoiding doing anything about the academic dishonesty at all, either by simply looking the other way and pretending it didn’t happen, or else using the suspected academic dishonesty as an occasion to give an alternate exam or some kind of second chance assessment. I’m not against second chances or mercy in general, but look: academic honesty is bad. It’s more than just youthful indiscretion, like drinking too much at a frat party or sleeping through an exam because you were up all night studying (or drinking too much at a frat party). Academic dishonesty is a willful, intentional violation of trust, and if you are a professor and have a shred of respect for the life of the mind, you have to do something about it, even if it might earn you a reputation as a mean SOB among students. (This goes double for new faculty, for whom academic dishonesty is often perpetrated by students as a means of testing boundaries.) 
• Executing a summary judgment on the basis of evidence alone, without the students giving their side of things, even if you are within your rights as a prof to do so and even if the evidence for academic dishonesty is overwhelming. First of all, I’ve had many cases of something I thought was academic dishonesty that could be logically explained away by students when I confront them with the work; or at least, I could see that the student was so scared and authentically sorry that I can at least scale my recommendation for their punishment back a little. Second, many times students will simply confess when they are confronted. 

Academic dishonesty is not only easy to catch, it’s a horrible miscarriage of the mutual trust upon which all of education is built, and students who willfully engage in it deserve all the punishment they receive, if not more. There’s simply no rationalizing it, and I don’t think we in higher ed do nearly enough to eradicate it. 

I bring this up because of virusdoc’s comment, just made on an old post: 

Resurrecting an old thread, but I just graded my first ever take-home essay test (open-book, open web, but no collaboration allowed and students were instructed to make sure their ideas and words were their own).

Out of 30 tests graded thus far, there were two students who boldly copied and pasted huge blocks of text from multiple websites into their test answers, without so much as an attempt to change any words or even alter the font from that in the website. It was horrific. In addition, I uncovered one clear example of two students who almost certainly shared answers. One of them had screwball, left-field answers for two questions in a row, using examples that weren’t in our text and I hadn’t discussed in lecture. This was odd, but I dismissed it as a singularity. Several tests later, another student used exactly the same screwball examples for the same two questions. (no other student has used these examples). Further comparison of the two students’ tests side by side reveals multiple verbatim quotes in their answers, and several of the answers that are not verbatim are structurally highly related.

I never anticipated senior level students would a) cheat so frequently, and b) do so in such stupid, obvious ways.

Yee-ha for higher ed!

Yep. I’m actually a little (pleasantly) surprised that I haven’t had a clear-cut incident of academic dishonesty yet in my own courses this semester. But that could be because I’ve taken to designing my courses specifically to avoid assessments with a high risk of cheating or plagiarism. I have very little in the way of take-home assignments that are worth very much.

That doesn’t seem right for higher education. Profs ought to be giving assignments that are challenging, engaging, and therefore take time and effort outside of class. But when we do that, there’s all this rampant and ridiculous cheating that takes place. So we profs feel this intrinsic pressure to make most of our grades come from timed assessments which are easier to manage, but which by definition operate at a lower cognitive level than the kinds of assignments we would like to give (and which college students ought to be getting). So cheaters and plagiarists are ruining not only their own education, but the education of others as well. 

True story from a faculty meeting today: A biology prof gave an assignment in a class at the beginning of last semester on the subject of proper academic conduct in a college class. The assignment was to research the definition of “plagiarism” and write about how it applies to the biology class. 

When the prof got the assignments back, guess what he discovered? That’s right: One of the students had plagiarized his plagiarism assignment.

As some great mind once said, there’s a fine line between stupid and clever. 

Editorial: Here’s the third article in the weeklong retrospective I am running this week. This article was, I think, the very first one I posted at CO9s about academic dishonesty (cheating, plagiarism, etc.) and might be the clearest statement I’ve made on this painful subject. Academic dishonesty remains one of the biggest personal issues for me in my work as a college professor.

Four Reasons Why Academic Dishonesty is Bad

Originally posted: February 24, 2006

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I’ve had to deal with my first academic dishonesty (AD) case of the semester this week. I won’t blog about the details, but suffice to say that this time it was plagiarism; a student copied some examples from a couple of web sites and submitted it as his/her own work. (I am now in the habit of typing any suspicious written work into Google to check for plagiarism, and that’s how I caught it this time.) In the recent past, I’ve also had to deal with larger plagiarism cases, situations where students copy each other’s homework, and catching a student with cheat notes on a test.

Every semester for the past few years, I’ve had at least one case of AD that I have to adminster. It is unfailingly a disappointing, saddening, time-consuming process. Even though my college takes a pretty hard line on AD, and so do I, some students still do it.

Why is academic dishonesty considered bad? Why do we in higher ed place such harsh sanctions against it? I’ve had to ask myself that this week, and here are a few ideas:

1. Academic dishonesty makes student assessment unreliable. When I give a piece of work to be graded, the reason I do so is that the grades I get back constitute data — data from which can extract information about how students are doing and adujst my teaching accordingly. If a student fakes his or her own work, through plagiarism or cheat notes or whatever, the data that I get don’t tell me truthful information that I can act upon. More importantly, the intellectual needs of students go unmet because according to the data, everything is going well, when everything is not going well. One corollary of this idea: It is not the case that academic dishonesty hurts only the students involved. It hurts all the students in the class who have the same needs as the cheater.
2. Academic dishonesty erodes the mutual trust between students and faculty that is at the core of higher ed. Students trust faculty to be knowledgeable in their fields and truthful in their teaching. Faculty trust students to give true information about their progress via graded work. In other words, I’ll teach you what you truly need to know, and you tell me truly how you’re doing in your work. That combination of truthfulness and trust should create a sort of spiral where one by one, student misunderstandings are removed and true mastery is attained. A breakdown on either end corrupts the entire process. And it only takes one instance of a breach of trust. If a student cheats or plagiarizes, that student’s work is suspect for the duration — even if the student learned his/her lesson and the suspicion is misplaced.
3. Academic dishonesty assumes that the end justifies the means and that the grade is the most important thing. In other words, the mind of the cheater is like this: “What really matters in college is my GPA. There is a lot of pressure to have a high GPA. Therefore I will do whatever is necessary to have a high GPA, whether or not it’s honest.” Well, it’s not the case that the ends justify the means, nor is it the case that grades are all-important. There’s a lot more to say about that maybe in another post.
4. Academic dishonesty is not in the long-term best interests of students. Or the short-term best interests, for that matter. The question is really one of economics. If you cheat on a quiz, for instance, and “earn” yourself five points by short-cutting mastery of some material — and then go and take a test that has 20 points of questions on the same material, and you lose all 20 because you didn’t master that material — then you are 15 points in the hole. There is a net loss in the process of cheating or plagiarizing, even if you don’t get caught. And if you do get caught, the stakes go that much higher. It’s rational choice theory applied to the classroom.

OK, commenters, you win. My proposal for extending the punishment for academic dishonesty is probably too draconian fascist much like walking the plank strict. Even if I fixed the “five-game suspension” problem for athletes, I admit most students caught in academic dishonesty aren’t cold-blooded cheaters but basically good people who are naive to the ways of college and have gotten themselves talked into thinking that cheating is acceptable if one can sort of morally justify it. And as such, they don’t need the full force of the sanctions that I proposed to get the lesson across.

But at least at my college, the professor reserves the right to suggest withholding parts of the standard penalty for academic dishonesty. While I always report academic dishonesty to the Dean, and while I have done so at least once a semester ever since I started working here, in fact I have almost never recommended the full punishment. So even if the range of punishments allowed were expanded drastically, like I proposed, a professor could hold back whatever portions s/he chose while retaining the right to drop a bomb on somebody who was violating academic honesty blatantly and without remorse. So I’m not sure why raising the upper end of what punishment can be meted out should be such a bad thing.

But regardless, I still think that punishing academic dishonesty at the level of grades only is barking up the wrong tree. Students get into academic dishonesty — cold-blooded or otherwise — by thinking that cheating is what’s best for their grade right now. It’s all about the grade. The punishment needs to communicate unambiguously that academic honesty is not all about the grade but about defending the basic foundation of college, which is mutual trust. You violate that trust, you dismember the community, and you should receive some temporary but substantive time-out from being a part of that community.

If it hurts or takes away something that’s important to the student, then so be it — cheating takes away something that is important to the college, and to me. 

My college’s official policy on academic dishonesty (cheating, plagiarism, and the like) goes as follows. When a student is “convicted” of academic dishonesty on a course assignment and it is their first offense, then:

• The student receives an automatic “0″ on the assignment.
• The student’s final letter grade in the course is reduced by one full letter. (An earned B- becomes a C-, etc.)

And should the student ever commit academic dishonesty a second time, the student is expelled.

This policy is pretty typical of a lot of colleges. But I am beginning to think it doesn’t go far enough. Here’s what I am thinking ought to happen to a student caught in academic dishonesty:

• The student gets a grade of “0″ on the assignment and a reduction of one letter on the final grade, as is currently the case.
• The student is barred for one year from holding any officer position in any official college organization. If the student currently holds such a position, the student is to be removed from that position immediately.
• The student is barred from membership in the Student Congress and any other form of student government for one year.
• The student is barred for one year from being an admissions counselor, campus tour guide, or any other function in which they represent the college to the general public.
• If the student is an athlete, the student is given a five-game suspension.
• If the student is a member of a fraternity or sorority, then the student is banned from the fraternity or sorority for one full semester except for the use of study tables.

All students take their studies with varying degrees of seriousness at any given time, but when a student commits plagiarism or cheats, or deliberately allows it to happen, I think the gloves are off, and colleges need to start hitting these people where they live.

Additions? Comments? Accusations of draconianism?