| Go to previous page. |
|
The academic enterprise involves encountering the world as it actually is, warts and all. Thus honesty about facts, sources, ambiguities, ideas, errors, inspirations, and so on lies at the very heart of what universities are about.
Universities expect their faculty to be scrupulously honest in their research and in the presentation of their findings, and they treat even small infractions as extremely serious offenses against academic morality.
The same expectation is extended, appropriately, to students, and anything but strict honesty is treated as "cheating" and is taken quite seriously.
It embarrasses me to have to discuss cheating, since the issues seem obvious. However, lest there be any doubts, here we go. The discussion represents my views and applies to my courses. Other professors may have slightly different formulations. I've also tried to include some of the less obvious stuff
- What Is Cheating?
- What Practices Are Misunderstood to be Cheating?
- What Is Plagiarism?
- Do Professors Agree About Cheating?
- What Happens to Students Caught Cheating?
- What Protections Does a Student Have Against False Charges?
- How Do Professors Detect Cheating?
(Including Several Episodes of "The Disastrous Adventures of Jimmy Gimmie")- Do Students Ever Get Away With Cheating?
- How Can I Avoid Even Appearing to Cheat?
- What Are Some Examples of Policy Ambiguities?
- What Recent Changes or Long-Term Trends Are There?
An important category of cheating is plagiarism, that is, quoting or closely paraphrasing the writings of others while leading the reader to believe that you are the author of the text.
(Plagiarism is not the same thing as copyright infringement. The works of Charles Dickens have long since passed into the public domain, but if you pretend to be the author of a passage from Oliver Twist, you are still plagiarizing.)
Some students find that they fall into plagiarism because they are not sure how to acknowledge their sources easily.
For more on citation, see:
The Internet has become a major source for student (and non-student) information-gathering, almost to the exclusion of paper sources. This makes it extremely easy for the faculty (or their surrogates) to use computer-assisted plagiarism detection, since a plagiarism-detection company can do the same kinds of searches that students do. Such companies also have access to additional files, often including the papers written by other students in your same classes, both now and in the past.
Computer-assisted plagiarism detection also is widespread in computer programming classes.
University computers can also potentially spot cross-student trends in centralized disciplinary records, although the implications of this are still unclear.
Because of the efficiency of computers in detecting plagiarism cases, plagiarism tends to get the spotlight at the moment, but other kinds of academic integrity concerns have not gone away, and the increased attentiveness to plagiarism is unlikely to diminish concern with such offenses as smuggling notes into exams or text-messaging answers during exams.
My prediction is that students will become better at disguising borrowed material, but the easiest thing for a student to do is simply cite the sources of any quoted material. (Just use my web page called How to Cite Sources As Painlessly As Possible.)
All professors agree that cheating is despicable. They disagree about the details. Very few of them will give you particularly useful generic guidance, but most of them are happy to answer questions with reference to their own classes.
There are two, only slightly related, consequences if you are caught cheating:
Virtually none.
As far as your grade is concerned, any change in your grade because of suspected or demonstrated academic dishonesty is at the discretion of the professor, just like other grades.
The Academic Senate has a committee on grade appeals, but traditionally it had no authority to consider cases unless "non-academic criteria" —use your imagination— could be shown to have been used. Its authority was eventually broadened so that students could also appeal grades that were lowered in response to a professor's suspicion of academic dishonesty if the professor did not bring formal charges. (Grades lowered for academic dishonesty when charges are not brought are sometimes called "vigilante Fs"). To my knowledge, however, no student has ever successfully brought such a challenge, and in any case the committee cannot actually change a grade except to convert it to a P or NP.
For practical purposes you should think in terms of there being no effective appeal. (Sometimes —rarely— a visit by a student to the department chair can help in getting the faculty member to reconsider. Provosts are virtually never effective in this.)
The student conduct violation is more complex. Under present undergraduate "academic integrity" procedures, if you are accused of cheating, the evidence adduced does not have to remove all doubt. If you have a formal hearing, the hearing board will work under a "51% probability" rule. So if the board is "51% convinced" that you are guilty, then you are judged guilty and are subject to penalties.
Theoretically of course you can hire a lawyer and try to sue anybody at any time for anything. However, I know of no instance in which an external civil court has agreed to accept a case brought by a student against a university to change a grade or to correct a putatively false charge of academic dishonesty.
In sum, undergraduates have virtually no truly effective appeal against false charges of cheating. Your most effective defense is to avoid even the slightest appearance of cheating.
Most professors have various ways to detect cheating, and we prefer to keep the details secret. However here are some fictional examples based on real cases that have come to my attention over the years. Names have been changed to protect the guilty.
Of course. People get away with all sorts of things. Nobody says it can't be pulled off. And like all professors, I know some of the ways it has been done successfully, and I know the weaknesses in the system that could potentially be exploited, even though they probably haven't been. But cheating is a VERY high-risk behavior. The consequences, both institutional (if they catch you) and in your own self-esteem (which you can't escape), are not worth it.
Generally, no. It is true that it is the same student's work, but nearly all professors regard it as having been "used up" in the first class. On the other hand there may be ambiguous cases where, for example, the student dropped a class and is subsequently retaking it and wants to resubmit material written for the class the first time. (Damned if I can see why that is plagiarism, but I did see a student hauled in for it.) When in doubt, ask!
Certainly not if each pretends to be the sole author. However some professors allow group projects. Such arrangements must be approved by the professor very explicitly and in advance.
Generally, no. However many professors will agree to allow this by prior arrangement on the understanding that this allows the student to take on a more ambitious project. With the agreement of both your history professor and your anthropology professor, for example, you may be able to submit a longer paper as the assignment for both classes. Without the prior permission of both of them, however, it is pretty certainly going to be classed as cheating.
A related question is whether sections of one paper can be incorporated into another paper (for example a termpaper into a master's thesis, or a master's thesis into a Ph.D. dissertation). The answer again is that it is critical to be very clear that this is what is happening and to be absolutely sure that the faculty member(s) involved have no objection. (I have seen this get ugly.)
In published books it is not infrequent to see a footnote explaining that a certain chapter began life as a journal article or a conference paper. (In the professional world, it is not necessary to acknowledge that one has used one of one's own unpublished compositions in the creation of something else. Unpublished is unpublished, after all. Analogously a student's work written in the past but never submitted for a class or for publication would seem to be still "unused" and hence legitimate, although some of my colleagues would probably disagree. Somebody always does.)
Not in all countries, and not at all universities. At UCSD the answer is yes, since in some fields delaying publication risks having someone else publish first. However it is critical to be very explicit about what is being done, and to have the clear permission of one's dissertation committee.
Despite urban legends about everybody cheating, cheating is in fact rare enough (or perhaps successful enough) that most professors have little experience with it and only rarely know the details about the procedures they are theoretically expected to follow. From time to time the faculty is sent a notice providing some advice on the subject (or urging them to crack down or go through channels).
The official UCSD Policy on the Integrity of Scholarship constitutes Appendix II of the Manual of the San Diego Division of the Academic Senate. It gives all the details of how cases are theoretically supposed to be handled. (It is confusingly written and seems to be designed to put people to sleep, but it is official.) In Fall of 2006, the UCSD Academic Senate established "a special webpage dedicated to Academic Integrity" intended to serve faculty and staff (link) and a PDF-format instructor's manual (link).
Nationally, student cheating continues to be an issue of great interest to the sorts of people who are interested in such things. There is widespread belief (but little evidence) that cheating of all kinds has become vastly more widespread than it was when professors went to school, and that it has become a serious national problem. Over the last few years, the academic senate after academic senate has been enacting revisions to its procedures. Locally, these are reflected in the various descriptions of "academic consequences" above.
The effects of these changes are not yet clear. At UCSD, some faculty members have been unhappy about the severity of the sanctions, which they support in theory and in public, but which they tend to see as too severe in particular cases. It is not clear that more charges have been in fact been filed since the enactment of the new procedures, and some faculty members suspect other faculty members of "covering up" some offenses because of the severity of the sanctions once a case is reported.
I regret to say that there is no evidence of Senate interest in protecting students from false charges. Students called before administrative hearings can still be convicted on the "preponderance" (read: 51%) of the evidence, and nothing realistically prevents a professor from giving a lowered grade regardless of the outcome of a disciplinary hearing or even without filing charges, thus without giving a student a chance for self-defense. (Indeed, the system seems to me to be conducive to a kind of "plea bargaining" between students and professors to swap a lower grade for the non-filing of charges regardless of actual guilt or innocence.)
The inevitable conclusion is that it is critical never to cheat, and always to avoid anything which, while innocent, could possibly be misunderstood as cheating. Remember that Jimmy Gimmie never graduated, but perished in ignominy. (Well, he is a fictionalized composite, but you get the general idea.)
This page has been viewed
times since 070928