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| Illustration by Walter
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semester, a longtime Duke professor had an academically unsettling
experience. For a freshman seminar, he had assigned a paper on the
writings of Louis Armstrong. One of the fifteen papers that came back
to him didn’t seem quite right. It was “beautifully written,”
he recalls. But it dwelled on the generic topic of jazz and American
culture. And it came from a student who hadn’t exactly performed
with distinction in class.
Suspicious of the paper’s origins, the professor
brought it to the university’s associate dean for judicial affairs,
Kacie Wallace ’89. Through a keyword search, it took Wallace
less than five minutes to find the paper on an Internet term-paper
site. The student had even kept the original title. It’s not
tough to find Internet assistance in those moments of academic crisis:
One site offers “more than 25,000 topics to choose from”—in
the category of post-Civil War U.S. history alone, those topics range
from “President McKinley and Expansionism” to “Mexican-American
Soldiers in World War II”—along with “custom writing
services.”
The head of the faculty’s Academic Council, Peter
Burian, observes that cheating has been a pedagogic problem at least
since students assembled in Plato’s academy. And ancient authors
traded charges of plagiarism. (Burian is a classical studies professor.)
But there seems to be a fresh focus on the problem. In the 1960s,
one in four surveyed students admitted to cheating once or more on
a test in the previous year. By 1993, that figure had doubled. And
given the Internet addiction of today’s students, there’s
concern about whether the ease of electronic cutting and pasting will
aggravate the problem.
That concern was given new
weight this spring, when some 122 University of Virginia students
were accused of copying from one another’s term papers in an
introductory physics course. As many as half of them are expected
to face the only penalty available for cheating: “permanent dismissal
from the university,” or loss of degrees awarded in earlier years,
as the so-called “single sanction” rule demands.
In force for almost 160 years, Virginia’s honor system
“directly expresses the principle of student self-governance,”
according to a statement from the Honor Committee.
“‘Honor’ at the university is far more
than a word or a student organization. The Honor System provides students
with tangible benefits enjoyed every day. You may write checks with
local merchants simply by showing your student I.D., and you may take
unproctored exams in the comfort of your room or in a pavilion garden.
Students at the university live in at atmosphere unfettered by distrust
and temptation.”
Technology, though, can heighten temptation. And the irony
in this episode is apparent: The same technology that fostered plagiarism
allowed its detection. A computer program devised by the physics professor—a
program that detects similar word patterns in term papers—uncovered
the copying. As a New York Times article reported, “In an era
when people swap music over the Internet, forward e-mail messages,
and send texts to each other with a single keystroke, the lines between
collaboration and theft have blurred.”
Penny Rue ’75, dean of
students at the University of Virginia, says student habits with the
Internet have “made it more difficult for faculty to educate
students about what constitutes proper research techniques, how to
cite different kinds of work appropriately, how to give suitable attribution
for ideas. This is a serious challenge to all universities in the
information age.” But even given the fracas over physics, she
doesn’t see a serious challenge to the venerable honor system.
“I believe this episode has affirmed the honor code and its importance
to the university,” she says, adding that Virginia’s alumni
“consistently cite the honor system as one of the most important
features” of their campus experience.
“The level of conversation about this incident at
virtually any university gathering shows the seriousness with which
the community views the honor system. There is disagreement about
the single sanction, but that is natural, and shows that students
still care very much about the system and want to make it their own.”
In the 1999-2000 academic year, Duke took part in a multi-institutional
survey project meant to show whether, in fact, students cared very
much about academic integrity. With support from the John Templeton
Foundation, the project was led by the Center for Academic Integrity,
a national consortium of 200 colleges and universities that is based
at Duke and is affiliated with the Kenan Institute for Ethics. Four
hundred Duke students were invited to participate in the survey; 242
replied. Faculty members were also surveyed.
A HISTORY OF HONOR
 |
| Putting it on the
line: first-year students sign the pledge during orientation
in August |
As a study for the president’s office
put it decades before the adoption of the current (1993) honor
code, “The honor system at Duke University has had an up-and-down,
on-again-off-again existence.”
Duke’s predecessor institution, Trinity College,
declared in its 1879-1880 “General Laws” that “Every
student before entering must sign a copy of these laws, thereby
pledging his honor as a gentleman to obey them.” But the
pledging requirement disappeared after four years.
Around the turn of the century, the catalogue was
affirming that “students are trusted,” but “when
it is found that they cannot respond to confidence, they are
quietly advised to return home.” The first year for Duke
University, 1924, brought the introduction of an amorphous if
elevated-tone “honor system.” As a somewhat later
catalogue put it, “honor is the great thing in the world”;
students, “bound together by honor,” would “go
ever onward—with happy hearts and smiling faces.”
The Woman’s College Handbooks for the Thirties
highlight “a high sense of honor” as the basis of
a “general Conduct Rule”; by the late Forties, a published
“Honor Code” for women emphasized personal honor,
individual responsibility, and cooperation.
In the late 1950s, the Women’s Student Government
Association sparked a campus-wide campaign for an honor code.
The chief honor-code advocate was the president of the WSGA,
Liddy Hanford ’58—later cabinet secretary Elizabeth
Hanford Dole. In a referendum, Duke’s women students voted
96 percent in favor, while the all-men West Campus was divided
about 50-50. “The responsibility of reporting violations
of the honor code was particularly objectionable” to the
men, she said.
A later initiative, also identified with the Women’s
Student Government Association, would have allowed each advanced-level
class to be given a choice—either the proctor system or
the honor system. Hanford hoped at the time that this kind of
gradualism would “begin the establishment of a tradition
of honor at Duke.” But for a class-centered honor code
to take hold, every member of a given class would have had to
cast a “yes” vote. That proved impossible. So even
the gradual approach to honor faltered.
Then in 1978, Terry Sanford, president at the time,
asked the Class of ’82 to take four years to establish
at Duke what he called “a new concept of an honor code.”
In Sanford’s words, “It would propose honor for the
sake of honor, not merely caution and care in order to evade
the penalties of law.”
What the class produced was a “Duke Honor Commitment.”
Its acceptance was voluntary; the student was the only one who
would charge himself or herself with violation. According to
the commentary behind the commitment, “The liberal education
that Duke offers cannot be considered complete if honor is not
pursued as a tandem goal.” |
The Duke survey showed a fairly small number of
transgressions in several areas—plagiarizing a paper; turning
in a paper based on information obtained from a term-paper “mill”
or website; copying from other students with or without their knowledge;
cheating on a test or helping someone else cheat on a test. But it
did point to a range of other problem behaviors. Forty-five percent
of the responding students reported that they had engaged in unauthorized
collaboration; 38.5 percent in copying a few sentences without footnoting
them in a paper; 37 percent in falsifying lab or research data; 24
percent in getting questions or answers from someone who had already
taken a test; 21 percent in receiving substantial, non-permitted help
on an assignment; 19 percent in fabricating or falsifying a bibliography.
Probably the biggest survey surprise came in attitudes
toward cheating. Most students frowned on copying from others with
or without their knowledge, or writing a paper for another student,
or plagiarizing in any fashion. But only 24 percent gauged unauthorized
collaboration as a serious form of cheating. Receiving substantial,
non-permitted help on an assignment and falsifying lab or research
data received around the same ranking. Just 40 percent viewed copying
another student’s computer program as serious; the figure for
the more general category of turning in work done by someone else
was a less-than-reassuring 44 percent. While most students aren’t
rampantly cheating, a lot of them have a remarkably casual attitude
toward cheating.
Part of that attitude may reflect what Missy Walker ’03
refers to as “ambiguity in faculty expectations.” Walker,
chair of the student-run Honor Council, says that in math and engineering
classes in particular, problem sets completed as homework are a substantial
part of a student’s grade. In the absence of explicit faculty
guidance, students will be quick to realize the advantages of working
in tandem. She notes that students charged with plagiarism routinely
say they didn’t know the conventions of citation.
Cheating arises not just in an atmosphere of ambiguity,
but in a culture committed to getting ahead. In a survey by Who’s
Who Among High School Students, 80 percent of high-achieving high
school students admitted to having cheated—a figure suggesting
that it’s not just the struggling student who’s the problem
student. Eighty-three percent said cheating was common at their school;
53 percent did not believe that cheating was a serious ethical violation.
Some anecdotal indications point to the same problem. Students at
a Chicago high school, including some of the top scholars in the school
and the student-body president, were found to have cheated in an academic
decathlon in 1995. They had used a pilfered test to memorize the answers.
(Newspaper accounts also noted that in the same year, the president
of the school board was jailed for income-tax evasion.)
Such reported behavior is consistent with findings from
the work of Donald McCabe, founder of the Center for Academic Integrity
and a professor of organization management at Rutgers University.
McCabe has conducted surveys with tens of thousands of students over
the past decade. He was the principal investigator for the most recent
study; he also ran two previous surveys at Duke in 1990 and 1995.
“I believe there’s less cheating at the more
selective, more competitive schools,” he says, “though there
is more cheating among the more competitive students. Most people
feel that where there’s a high grade point average, there’s
a lower amount of cheating, that it’s an inverse relationship.
Actually, it’s more complicated than that. Some students at the
bottom are cheating out of necessity to keep parents off their backs,
to keep up their grades in order to stay eligible for scholarships.
And some students at the top are cheating owing to the intensity of
the competition. They want to go to the top professional schools,
and a hundredth of a point on their GPA, as they see it, might make
the critical difference. They’re just driven.”Duke students
were driven—though hardly with great interest or energy—to
install the current honor code in the spring of 1993. Just 2,600 undergraduates
voted in the campus election, and just 52 percent supported the honor
code. Characterizing the code as “modest in its expectations,”
President Nannerl O. Keohane says it “has yet really to take
root on campus.” She adds, “It is true that all students
sign it, it is routinely posted and printed, and it does bind students
to demonstrate integrity in the pursuit of their intellectual endeavors
and to encourage their peers to do the same. However, for many students
and faculty members, the honor code is peripheral, elective, and unclear.”
The recent survey backs up those assessments: Sixty-two
percent of the student
respondents rated “the average student’s understanding of
Duke’s policies concerning student cheating” low or very
low. Even higher percentages of faculty rated the faculty’s understanding
of those policies low or very low.
If the honor code is peripheral, part of the reason may
be that it speaks to an age of chivalry and elitism—to values
that have fallen out of the favor in broad sectors of the academy.
Elizabeth Kiss, director of the Kenan Institute, acknowledges that
the traditional honor-code schools are often rooted in “notions
of gentlemanly honor.” As she sees it, though, “You could
make a very strong case for an honor code from a diverse, democratic
vision of an academic community.
“One of the things that’s really powerful about
an honor code is that the students develop the rules and help to adjudicate
them. Even if you look at schools that haven’t moved to a full-blown
honor code, one of the things they feel very strongly about is student
involvement in the process. Students are living under the rules that
they themselves helped to frame and are responsible for upholding.
I think that’s a very powerful expression of the democratic ideal.
There are some schools—and I think this would be an interesting
model for Duke to consider—where students every year have to
reformulate the honor code, so that the process is always fluid and
students are always a part of it.”
A “cheating culture,” Kiss says, is defined
by an us-versus-them attitude, where it’s either students against
other students or, more typically, students against the faculty. “What
you find in very well-functioning honor-code communities is a sense
that students feel they have a stake in the system. They feel this
is their code.”
Kiss says immersion in a strong honor-code environment
can change individual student behavior, and can in fact be life-changing.
And McCabe’s research seems to confirm that: For the student
who cheated in high school and goes on to an honor-code university,
“there’s a high probability that he’ll be extremely
reluctant to cheat, or at worst will engage in nickel-and-dime cheating,
not serious cheating.” McCabe says that peer influence exerts
a stronger influence than an individual sense of honor. “At campuses
with strong honor codes, particularly those that are smaller in size
and where it’s hard to remain anonymous, the reason you don’t
cheat is that it’s socially unacceptable. Other students will
know who the cheaters are, and they will look down on you. They’ve
been given a tremendous amount of freedom in this environment, non-proctored
exams and so on. They’re primarily responsible for maintaining
that environment, and they are responding to the high level of trust
that exists.”
It’s a good thing if students are sufficiently malleable
to develop new habits: McCabe has found that cheating in high schools
is quickly migrating to the Internet. “And while Internet cheating
is not yet endemic in college, watch out,” says The Philadelphia
Inquirer in reporting on the latest McCabe findings. “Today’s
high-school students surely will bring it with their backpacks.”
As Kiss puts it, “There is strong evidence that the
so-called invisible curriculum is especially important for students—what
the peer culture is like, what messages they’re getting from
their peers. And if you ask students who graduate from honor-code
schools what was most important about their college experience, the
honor code is one of the first things they cite. People talk about
it as a touchstone of their professional lives; this is something
they will keep thinking about.” The college years, then, can
be key years of moral development.
Exactly, says divinity school professor Stanley Hauerwas.
An academic community should be less concerned with teaching values—which
he says can be reduced to arguing over the attributes of cherry ice
cream as against chocolate ice cream—than about teaching virtues.
Classroom objectivity is pure cowardice, he says. “I think the
modern university that says we want to train students to make up their
own minds is simply self-deceptive. No teacher teaches to have students
make up their own minds. I tell my students that they don’t have
minds worth making up until I’ve trained them.”
The faculty, in his view, have let go of important notions
of authority in favor of a reliance on expertise—“a peculiar
modern invention,” as he calls it, that substitutes command of
information for wisdom. For his part, Hauerwas is drawn to the master-apprentice
relationship historically associated with the craft trades, where
“the truth and truthfulness become absolutely essential for carrying
on,” he says. “Moral life is about the formation of virtuous
people by tradition-formed communities.
“People always ask me, Where are these institutions
that still produce people of virtue? And I always say, [the Marine
training camp at] Parris Island and medical schools. Medical schools
are still quite extraordinary in the kind of moral training they provide.
For example, one of the fundamental commitments of medicine is that
you are to care for a patient in a way that transcends all other considerations.
So this could be a vile child molester, and yet you as the physician
have to take care of their bad gall bladder. Now that’s really
extraordinary moral training. You must do this to be honored, to be
a member of the medical world. I think the Marines are really very
good at it too. I’m a pacifist, but as a person committed to
non-violence, I think we have to be at least as intentional in our
training of people as the Marines are.”
In a Duke talk he gave a year ago, Hauerwas said that
cheating is “a more serious crime than murder for those engaged
in the activities of learning and teaching.” He went on to argue
that “Because judgments must be learned through apprenticeship
to master, some dead, some living, we cannot and do not use others’
work without due acknowledgment, because that would betray our activity.”
Due acknowledgment of someone else’s work, then, “is a way
of indicating who are the necessary members of the conversation I
am participating in to acquire the same kinds of nuanced judgments
that I find exhibited in their lives.”
Hauerwas defends honor codes as necessary because “we
need one another to be good, and that is what we gesture to one another
through an honor code.” Good communities and good institutions
“need to find ways to remind themselves of what they are about
as well as to give initiates a sense of those forms of life that make
the community what it is.”
|
| Not
only are students at strong honor-code schools “afraid
that somebody will rat on them,” but, on a more noble level,
“they’re thinking that they don’t want to put
their fellow students in this really horrible situation. |
|
Doesn’t it demand a huge cultural shift to
demand that students turn in other students who violate a code of
conduct? In the Duke survey, just 18 percent of the responding students
said they would report a cheating incident to an appropriate authority.
“Of course, it’s a big thing to ask,” says Hauerwas.
“But I can’t imagine life going on in the university without
that requirement. Our work would be impossible if we didn’t believe
in it.”
One often-cited example of a community that gives frequent expression
to honor is Davidson College, whose president is Bobby Vagt M.Div.
’73. Vagt says the practice of honor was first codified at Davidson
back in the mid-1800s; the focus was on preventing lying, cheating,
and stealing. Over time, the responsibility has shifted in the direction
of students, and honor has come to be understood “more in terms
of positives than negatives.”
The Davidson honor code encompasses the social and academic spheres
alike. “Life is of a single piece. We see the transition from
the classroom to the dorm room as seamless in terms of personal comportment,”
Vagt says. He says the code is “embedded” in the community,
and that it’s one of the top reasons students cite for attending
Davidson. There are deliberate conversations about honor, discussions
organized by the student Honor Council, and public signing ceremonies.
“Rather than having a set of rules of what we can’t do,
we really define what our expectations are for each other. It goes
beyond self-scheduled exams; it’s why people leave book bags
hanging around unattended, why doors are left unlocked.”
Davidson’s code requires student to refrain from
cheating, including plagiarism. It also specifies that “every
student shall be honor-bound to report immediately all violations
of the honor code which come under his or her observation; failure
to do so shall be a violation of the honor code.” Vagt calls
the reporting requirement “the hardest piece of the honor code,”
but he says it works: The college had four honor-code cases in the
fall semester, and in two of the cases students turned in other students.
But according to Rutgers researcher McCabe, “turning
in other students doesn’t happen often,” even at schools
with strong honor codes. “The ‘rat clause,’ as students
lovingly refer to it, varies from the requirement that students should
confront another student or report the transgression, to a recommendation
to report, to a requirement to report but with no penalty for failing
to report.” The national trend, he says, is for colleges and
universities to reduce the reporting pressure placed on students.
And where student reporting does go on, it’s typically because
someone was affected directly by another’s cheating—perhaps
because a grading curve was thrown off, or the student’s own
test answers were being copied.
Even The New York Times Magazine’s “Ethicist”
columnist, Randy Cohn, isn’t big on student reporting requirements.
In a late-April column, he wrote: “While it is reasonable to
ask students to regulate their own behavior, little good will come
of compelling them to police the behavior of their schoolmates. For
one thing, few will do so. Our society has real ambivalence about
informing. To punish only the occasional kid for failing to inform
is arbitrary and capricious, and it undermines the sense of the school
as a just community.”
“Some people would say that because it’s so
hard for students to report, we should drop reporting requirements
from honor codes,” says the Kenan Ethics Institute’s Kiss.
“There are others who would say—and I’m inclined to
be in this group—that it’s really important to have that
requirement there. The service academies have started to distinguish
rather sharply between breaking the code by not reporting someone
and breaking the code by cheating. If used to be that if somehow they
found out that you knew somebody had cheated, you could be expelled.
They’re starting to recognize that this is an incredibly hard
moral dilemma for a young person. But at the same time, having that
obligation in the code may be a very important way of at least getting
a student to confront someone—not necessarily to turn them in,
but to confront them and say, you’ve put me in a horrible position
because I’m obligated to report you and yet I feel like I can’t
report you out of a sense of friendship or loyalty.”
An obligation to report carries a strong deterrence value
against cheating, Kiss says. “Not only are students afraid that
somebody will rat on them, but, on a more noble level, they’re
thinking that they don’t want to put their fellow students in
this really horrible situation. So you’re creating a kind of
community ethos.”
There may be gentler paths toward a community ethos. The
University of Maryland at College Park has a code that does not include
provisions for non-proctored exams or obligate students to report
any cheating they might observe. But it does provide for significant
student involvement in the resolution of alleged cases of academic
misconduct among students. And it encourages student involvement in
promoting academic integrity. Gary Pavela, Maryland’s director
of judicial programs and student ethical development, says student
members of the Honor Committee lobbied the academic deans to make
academic integrity a prime topic in classes. A decade ago, Maryland
had no honor code.
Pavela characterizes the atmosphere then as “a little
like the Cold War, where the faculty were designing ways to prevent
academic cheating and the students treated beating the system as a
game. Honor codes and honor councils can challenge the attitude that’s
fairly common in high schools and some colleges that academic integrity
is sort of us versus them, faculty versus students.” The code
was finally put in place at the suggestion of students serving on
the institution’s governing board.
As he ponders an emerging interest in academic integrity,
Pavela speaks in Hauerwas-like language, emphasizing the campus as
a place of enlightenment. He sees that interest, in part, as a reaction
to the view that “particularly at large institutions, faculty
members have vacated the fields of ethics and character development,
that they feel very uncomfortable talking about those things in their
discipline.” Students, then, have the sense “that they’re
missing something, that this isn’t a trade school, and they are
interested in hearing out faculty on broader and deeper issues. There’s
almost a spiritual interest in finding meaning.”
“The implementation of an honor code is incremental,”
Pavela says. “We may evolve into the full traditional model here.
Maybe the next step is non-proctored exams; we’re expressly heading
in that direction. But it won’t work to simply say, tomorrow
we’re having non-proctored exams. It’s not a matter of an
edict. It’s a matter of creating a culture. The more students
hear the faculty and their own peers talking about wanting to be at
a place where honor is valued, the less academic dishonesty there
will be.”
Part of creating such a culture is being clear about expectations.
In his introductory “Electric Circuits” course, Gary Ybarra,
assistant research professor in electrical and computer engineering,
gives his students a written statement about honor. The statement
spells out examples of academically dishonest behavior that he’s
encountered—submitting another student’s work, submitting
a lab report for which the lab exercise was never performed, accessing
another student’s computer files and transferring data.
Ybarra, who sits on the Undergraduate Judicial Board,
makes it clear in the statement that he feels an obligation “to
confront those individuals whose work is questionable.” He notes
that “the very nature of engineering is collaborative,”
and that “creativity is often generated from sharing ideas and
discussing methods of attacking problems.” But he offers a specific
warning against “showing to others any written solution to a
problem that is to be turned in for a grade.” (In his research,
Rutgers’ McCabe has noted a dramatic increase in student collaboration
on assignments where the professor had explicitly asked for individual
work. “While some professors strongly encourage such work, others
forbid it, and some fail to delineate their expectations,” he
and a co-author write in Change magazine. “In the face of such
confusion, many students choose the path of least resistance and elect
to work together.”)
Ybarra says that when he began teaching at Duke in 1983,
he didn’t make it a habit to stress academic-integrity issues.
After taking several cases to the judicial board, he decided to outline
his expectations in writing. He also says he takes practical steps
to combat “wandering eyes,” such as giving different versions
of the test in a test sitting.
Because of careless work habits and time-management issues,
even good students can succumb to the cheating temptation, Ybarra
says. “The engineering curriculum in particular is very demanding.
Some students who haven’t planned very carefully how to manage
their time can experience panic as the due date for an assignment
nears. And their judgment can change. That can happen to anyone, from
the academically challenged to the academically gifted.”
But a lot of professors are reluctant to take cheating
incidents to the judicial board, he says, preferring instead to deal
with those incidents “in-house”—perhaps by failing
the student in the assignment. They may feel that judicial-board procedures
are too cumbersome and time-consuming. “It’s a hassle not
only in terms of time and energy, but the very purpose of it is sickening,”
Ybarra says. “It’s unpleasant for everyone involved; it’s
unpleasant for the student, it’s unpleasant for the professor.”
Professors also may think that the likely punishment won’t
fit the offense. The “precedented sanction,” in his phrase,
is a two-semester suspension from the university. He offers the examples
of a student who is a chronic copier of others’ work, and another
student who, before turning in homework, talks through a single problem
with his classmates. Those are very different infractions, but they
may not be treated differently, he says. “I’ve seen a student
who copied lab reports all semester and got a two-semester suspension.
I’ve had a student who turned in ten lines of computer code identical
to another person; working out those ten lines of code might have
taken an hour or less. And they got the same sanction. That’s
a problem.”
The judicial board adjudicated eighteen academic-dishonesty
cases in the fall semester. (A hearing panel consists of three students,
one academic dean, and one faculty member or a student-affairs administrator
from a pool of Undergraduate Judicial Board members.) Kacie Wallace,
the chief judicial-affairs officer, says, “I know we can’t
have absolute consensus on what the sanctions should be. But I do
think we should probably be doing more to talk with faculty about
what the sanctions are. And if there’s not agreement, then let’s
change them. We’re not wedded to particular sanctions; it’s
just sort of what has evolved over the years.”
Wallace also sees the system in more flexible terms than
Ybarra. If there is a finding of academic dishonesty, whether it’s
plagiarism or cheating, “the discussion will start at a two-semester
suspension,” she says. “They will look at the nature of
the violation. Is it egregious, or is it less of an infraction? Is
it just a quick lapse in judgment, or did the student really take
some time to prepare for this infraction? They’ll also look at
what was going on with the student at the time of the violation. If
there are lots of personal issues—family issues, illness—then
the board may take that into consideration. Very few cases will result
in what we call a suspended suspension, which means there’s no
actual time away from school. Maybe 30 to 40 percent of the cases
will result in a one-semester suspension. The majority probably result
in a two-semester suspension. But we’ve also had two expulsions
this year, permanent expulsions for academic dishonesty, in very egregious
cases.”
In both of the recent expulsion cases, the students “were
doing very well in school,” Wallace says. “There’s
the assumption that plagiarism and cheating are often done by the
students who are really struggling to make it at Duke. But I think
in a significant number of these cases, it’s the more driven,
the more competitive students who are trying to get the edge. There’s
a lot of parental pressure to make all A’s. There’s a lot
of peer pressure to succeed. There’s a lot of pressure to get
into a particular law school or medical school.” And that felt
pressure can make the judicial hearings all the more wrenching, she
says. “Students and their families are very outcome-driven. And
sometimes it feels like the education itself is less important than
what the final transcript shows, what the GPA shows, what the résumé
shows. Rather than seeing it as an educational intervention, which
is how we would like to see the process, they see it as affecting
where the student goes next. We’re looking for an educational
opportunity and they’re looking for an outcome.”
Cheating infractions range from bringing in notes to a
test to stealing a test to changing answers and then submitting the
test for re-grading. While plagiarism cases have been on the rise,
instructors are more effective in combating it. Duke decided against
deploying a university-wide service, available commercially, that
automatically compares submitted papers to every document available
on the Internet. Still, says Wallace, some academic departments have
been identifying plagiarism-combating search engines—like Turnitin.com,
which advertises an online service that makes “determining the
originality of any paper a breeze.”
She says, “In the Eighties, when I was in school,
you had to do more work to cheat. You had to steal tests, you had
to collaborate with somebody, you had to look on someone else’s
paper. Now, it’s easier to do it in the confines of your own
room.” Cheating and plagiarism have become more an act of intellectual
gamesmanship than an exercise in physical labor, she says. Academic
dishonesty may not be more rampant or more egregious than in the past,
but it’s stealthier. She mentions a couple of cases where students
interested in previewing tests have tried to break into a faculty
member’s computer account.
Wallace acknowledges faculty concerns about the time investment
involved in investigating academic-integrity cases. Some faculty members
will simply hand her a paper, tell her it doesn’t resemble the
student’s work, and ask her to investigate it. Others will spend
hours in Internet searches. “None of us likes to take the time”
to probe for dishonesty and to show up for a hearing, she says, “but
it’s an important thing” for an academic community. And
she says she wishes there were broader understanding that presumably
punitive sanctions are intended also to be educational. “If you
hear what goes on in those board hearings, if you hear the struggles
these students are having, a lot of times what they need is a break
from school, a break to sort of re-prioritize, to figure out what’s
going on before they come back and refocus. We’ve done a lot
of psychological counseling, academic-skills counseling, reflection
papers.”
There’s been a lot of reflecting on the part of the
faculty. That’s been satisfying to Missy Walker ’03, chair
of the Honor Council, who, in an open letter to the faculty, said
they served—consciously or not—as role models for students.
“Between August and May, we are…literally and figuratively
taking notes.” In all four of her fall-semester courses, she
says, instructors discussed the honor code in class and placed it
on their syllabi. And at the initiative of the student Honor Council,
freshman orientation last fall included, for the first time, an honor-code
“signing ceremony.” Walker says she and other members of
the Honor Council have overheard fellow students talking about the
honor code; one student, she says, challenged another’s casual
stance toward cheating by reminding him that he had “signed that
thing saying you wouldn’t cheat.”
In April, the executive committee of the Arts and Sciences
Council and the Engineering Faculty Council endorsed a several-part
resolution on academic integrity. The joint resolution calls for the
creation of an Academic Integrity Council, which would develop outreach
programs, look for other ways to promote integrity, and monitor the
impact of technology on academic dishonesty. The resolution encourages
faculty to clearly communicate a concern for honesty to their students,
and to educate their students about the nature of misconduct in their
discipline. Educational approaches might include printing a statement
about the honor code on course syllabi, asking students to write out
and sign an honor pledge on assignments, serving as a role model by
citing sources in lectures, or providing clear guidelines regarding
collaboration.
There are also suggested prevention measures: assigning
narrow and specific research topics and collecting drafts; changing
exams and problem sets annually; and reducing the temptation to cheat
by having students sit at a distance from each other or producing
alternate versions of an exam.
One goal targeted by the resolution is clarifying academic-integrity
policies. In the ambiguous language of the current faculty handbook,
instructors are either “expected” or “required”
to report academic-integrity violations to the judicial board. And—though
it may be seen as inconsistent with having an honor code—they
are required to proctor exams. The resolution supports a first-time
publication embracing all aspects of academic integrity.
According to Walker, “Obviously, there is a point
in every Duke student’s life where he or she will no longer be
taking exams, a point where the primary focus of his or her life will
no longer be in writing papers for introductory classes. It is at
that point where the most vital ethical decisions will be made: What
does a signature mean? What is a verbal statement or a promise? What
should I do? These and others are the questions we will face—as
researchers, politicians, journalists, or stay-at-home parents.”
Maybe an honor code can be considered a “utopian”
idea, Walker says. Or maybe “a game.” She says she prefers
to think of it as practice for a thoughtful life.
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