cheating

Duke: 34 MBA students punished for cheating
By Bloomberg News
May 1, 2007

Duke University's Fuqua School of Business disciplined 34 first-year master of business administration students who were caught in the school's largest cheating scandal.

Nine students face expulsion, and 15 face a one-year suspension and a failing grade in the course. Ten others were found guilty of lesser offenses, nine of whom received a failing grade and one who flunked the assignment, [marketing professor Gavan J.] Fitzsimmons said in the e-mail.

The problem came to light when a professor noticed similarities in answers by students on a take-home test.

So what do you do about cheating? I've had students do exactly this kind of work - the "overly similar". I've also had students who turn in work which is clearly plagiarized from a published source - my god sometimes from the ONLY source they used in the assignment. Did they think I wouldn't notice? It's one article! And they copied and pasted out of it!

This year I had a student go kinda kooky on me for even suggesting that he had sampled too freely from the source text in his writing. Two other students had also done similarly non-original work. All three had a common kind of reaction, (although the level and tone varied by student - one got petulant, one got creepy, and one seemed just plain old perplexed).

When I explained to each student that s/he had used too much text straight from or closely paraphrased from the source, each of them individually told me that the words they had used (i.e. the text from the articles) were the best way to state what they meant. The perplexed one said "So you want us to write more?" when I told him that his answer was only three sentences long and two of those sentences were nearly identical to text from the article. I tried very hard to explain what "summarize" means in a way that doesn't suggest one should copy and paste. "I want you to read it and then think about what you read, what it meant, and what the author was saying. Then I want you to share YOUR THOUGHTS with me by writing them down."

This was apparently a novel concept. And I say that with only a hint of sarcasm. Seriously.

A friend of mine in another department recently (and vaguely) described having to ask a grad student to leave the PhD program for repeated cheating behavior. That person's excuse was that "in my country students work together all the time". This was perhaps not the most artfully conceived defense since most of the faculty in this program are not American (one of the two who are was raised in several other countries), and the international PhD students outnumber the domestic by about 5:1 in any given year.

When I see cheating in the undergrads I teach, I can't help feeling a little annoyed that this wasn't addressed in high school or earlier. Sometimes you just have this overwhelming sense that what you are seeing is part of a long standing pattern of behavior. I suppose when one encounters similar behavior in graduate students, one might feel similarly about the undergraduate instructors.

I can attest that my personal and indirect experiences are that the undergraduate faculty and instructors do NOT come down like they should on cheating and that the universities are doing a rather bad job of educating students in anything like academic or professional ethics (awareness of which might in some part inform the former).