On the Control of Academic Dishonesty
Among College Students
The
Definition
Most
colleges publish statements beginning with a definition of the
dishonesty they are concerned with.
Though this is plainly necessary it is surprisingly difficult to
do. Some of the definitions fail, or
are at least misleading, because they concentrate on the overt action, on what
can be seen by an all-seeing camera (as it were), rather than on the intent of
the malefactor. It is true that intent
is a slippery term in the common law, and Oliver Wendell Holmes was quite right
in trying to substitute a more objective criterion, such as the likely behavior
of "the reasonable person" in
the determination of guilt in the world at large; but in dealing with young
people in a (to them) novel environment it is both clearer and more humane to
talk about motive than about result.
The
simplest definition of academic dishonesty in students is this: Offering what
is not your own work as if it were, in order to deceive a professor into
believing you have answered his assignment.
Everybody knows this definition, though when they come to write one they
generally end up with something much more complicated. In my experience judging these things I have
never met a student who disputed the illegality of the offense charged. They may dispute having done it, but they
are never in any doubt about what cheating is.
When
a student presents to a professor, in answer to an assignment, work which is
not his or her own as if it were, or presents documents otherwise calculated to
deceive the professor, in order to receive an undeserved grade, we say that
student has violated the University's policy on academic honesty. The actual devices of academic dishonesty
are many and cannot all easily be listed; new ones appear as new forms of
subject matter and new modes of instruction and evaluation appear. The most common are these: plagiarism;
copying from a book, notes, or a neighbor's paper during an examination; obtaining
unauthorized advance information about examinations; falsifying or inventing
data, or in any way submitting a false report of one's academic actions.
An example of such false report is the changing of the form of a paper or examination after it has been graded and returned, to submit to the professor later for an improved grade, with the claim that the changed parts had been there all along, but had been overlooked in the original grading. Another form of false report is the inclusion of bibliographic references which were not in fact consulted: second-hand reports must always be presented as such. Certain kinds of vandalism are also construed as academic dishonesty if they are committed in pursuit of an undeserved high grade, or to inhibit competition from fellow students. A typical example is a student who forges a professor's signature on some form destined for the Dean or Registrar; but there are far worse cases, of those who deface library books and journals, or who destroy their neighbors' laboratory set-ups.
Plagiarism
While
there is seldom any question about whether a certain act constitutes academic
dishonesty, plagiarism is sometimes not well understood by newcomers to the
academic world. In particular, plagiarism
is often all but identified with academic dishonesty, especially by professors
in the humanities; but there are important differences in the perception of plagiarism,
as between professors and young students, which in my experience have led to
unnecessary pain and conflict. Even experienced professors, who understand
plagiarism perfectly well in the context of their world of scholarship, can
mistake its import in the classroom, as we shall see.
It
is legitimate and necessary for scholars and students to use, from time to
time, the words and ideas of their predecessors, and of their friends and
colleagues; we all, if we would see, must stand upon the shoulders of
giants. What we may not do is use these
words or ideas without acknowledgement, or else our readers will not be able
to judge the status of the information we are offering.
Suppose,
for example, it is a question of historical fact or of laboratory data. Our readers must know who obtained this
information, and under what circumstances.
A research paper typically contains partly our own observations and
reasoning, and partly those of others.
Whatever we repeat that was done by another is no more trustworthy than
that other person himself may be, so it is our duty to tell our readers who
that person is and where the original report may be found. The reader is entitled to whatever
information is needed to form a judgment, something that cannot be done
accurately if it is thought that the text being read describes only the work of
the author. Even if the author is
merely vague on the subject, the audience is thereby missing something that it
deserves to know.
It
is not, therefore, merely a matter of unmasking vainglory or literary theft
that is in question when scholars define plagiarism and prescribe procedures
for scholarly reference: footnotes, quotation marks, and the like. Whoever adds to the edifice of knowledge
must know what stones he is building upon, else his work may be wasted,
misdirected, unnecessarily repetitive, or based on false hypotheses.
In
the world of commercial publishing, of torts and contracts, plagiarism has
another meaning. A literary property is
like a patent or copyright, even if no copyright has yet been established. If a second person makes use of someone's
original idea, or words, music or picture in such a way as to deprive the
original author of money or repute he could otherwise have earned himself, that
second person must pay. It doesn't
matter if the second person did it unintentionally, perhaps forgetting that
the idea had come from the aggrieved.
And it doesn't matter at all whether anyone else in the world cares who
the true author was.
It
is worth noticing that in this world of torts and publishers, a plagiarism
from Montaigne or Dickens is no crime at all, since copyright is limited in
time. But in a scholar or politician,
what is not a tort can still be a sin, even if the material copied has been in
the public domain since Homer.
The
third domain of plagiarism is the artificial world of student exercises and
examinations. Tort is not in question
when a student copies a term paper from a scholarly source in a library. The original author earned little enough
from having produced the original paper, and surely loses nothing in either
dollars or reputation from the student's cheating; he would have no case in
court. The scholarly world too has lost
nothing. This cheating student is not
one of the giants upon whose shoulders we propose to stand; his only audience is his professor, who is
not reading the paper for information, and who does not propose to use the
data in the paper for anything at all.
In practical terms, it does not matter where the words came from, or
whether they are right. The thing is an
exercise only, designed to show the professor what the student has learned, or
what he can do, or has done, in answer to a quite artificial assignment.
The
student knows this. He knows there is
no "literary property" at stake in his plagiarism, and he knows that
nobody in the scientific world, or the historical profession, needs or will
use the information he is passing on.
Therefore he is, or may be, indifferent to moral instruction which
concentrates on the evils of plagiarism as they appear to the scholar or to the
commercial publisher.
It
is necessary for students to be taught the techniques of footnoting, quoting, and
so on, as part of their education in scholarship, and they should certainly be
taught the scholarly reasons for these rather elaborate procedures. In particular, that they are not rituals,
but rather a necessary caution, and instruction, for the reader. It is also necessary for students to be
taught what plagiarism means with respect to literary or artistic originality,
and what is dictated both by honor and the law of torts.
But
if professors give only these reasons, and only these definitions, they will be
missing the essence of academic dishonesty as it must be seen by students as
students. Our student plagiarist,
reading about "literary theft," need fear no lawsuits, since not a
nickel can ride on the outcome; and the danger of falsified or mislabelled
data, as in political campaigns or cancer research, is simply not real in the
context of a term paper for an undergraduate history course. Given the usual arguments for academic
probity, a thoughtful freshman might
shrug and conclude that all this is very well but does not describe him.
And
it doesn't. The student plagiarist is
committing a third kind of plagiarism.
It is plagiarism by University standards even if it is from a work a
thousand years old, and even if it steals nothing that can be missed or
profited by, and even if it stands no chance whatever of misleading its
audience concerning its subject matter.
All that is necessary is that it be designed to deceive its one reader
into believing the "author" deserves a C+ instead of a C.
On
the other hand, it sometimes happens that a student commits what is surely a
plagiarism by scholarly standards, but which does not seriously violate the
code of academic honesty we enforce by our proceedings. One case that came before our court last
year was that of a first-year student who wrote a short paper that made
extensive use of quotations from the textbook for the course. None were put in quotation marks, but the
book they were taken from was listed in a two-item Bibliography at the end of
the paper. In addition, most of the
quoted material was interspersed with parenthetical references to this or that
page of the book it came from, as for example, "(Williams, page
34,35)", and "(Ibbid, page
122)" [sic].
Though
not every quotation was thus referenced, and though the student had not
followed the prescribed format of footnotes below quotations placed in
quotation marks, it seemed ludicrous to suppose that this student was trying to
deceive the professor. It was the very
textbook of the course, after all, that was being copied from, and the very
pages from which the information had been taken were in many cases named; yet
the professor, who was as inexperienced in professing as this student was in
studying, felt it was his duty to report this "offense" to us.
We
are not often faced with such zeal. It
was a matter of some delicacy to have to inform the professor that while we
accepted all the allegations, the student was still not guilty. I believe we were able to mollify the professor
by saying that he could downgrade the paper for its errors of form, and perhaps
for not being as original in its ideas as he had a right to expect in this
particular assignment; but in the end we had to say that here was a case in
which a technical plagiarism, which could be actionable in court were there any
financial interest involved, was still not academic dishonesty. It was only a case of a student who still
had a lot to learn.
To
have to learn the rules of honesty in court is harsh, and should only be a last
resort. When a two year old child
commits a theft in a grocery store, we gently take the object out of its hands
and teach it a necessary lesson in self-restraint, one that has to be repeated
many times before civilization makes honesty into second nature. When it is a twelve year old child the
matter is more ambiguous. By that time
he should know better, yet we all know cases (perhaps our own) where admonition
and explanation were better than Juvenile Court. Ten years more, of course, and the child is a man; no excuses
then.
The
student who couldn't spell ibid was analogous to the two-year-old, for
all that the professor had passed out a sheet of paper at the beginning of the
semester explaining precisely how a "research paper" should be
organized and typeset. But there are
other occasions of academic dishonesty more analogous to the case of the twelve
year old, who knows stealing is "wrong," but somehow has not yet come
to see what is so wrong about doing wrong, or who perhaps still distinguishes,
for his own convenience, covert "borrowing" from "real
stealing." Such a child must
surely be taught a lesson, but not necessarily fingerprinted and assigned
legal counsel.
The
parallel case in the academic world is usually the work of a very young
student; I will describe a recent case.
The boy was a freshman, and was enrolled in a `preceptorial' course,
that is, a course designed for freshmen as a seminar on some rather specialized
subject, to give these beginners some taste of what scholarship means, and to
relieve the tedium of the usual freshman budget of required classes in math,
English and chemistry.
The
assignment was a term paper, in which the student was to answer a rather
pointed question. (I am changing the
question, and even the subject, to protect the identity of both student and professor.) "Was Bismarck a good thing for
Germany?" The student hadn't the
least idea how to answer. After all,
the professor hadn't himself answered it in class. There were two books of required reading for the course, but
neither one seemed to say whether Bismarck was good or bad.
So
the student went to the library, just as he had done in high school, and looked
up Bismarck in the Encyclopedia Britannica. (In high school one often is asked to go to the library and get
up a Report --- at least it was so in my day --- and the Encyclopedia, at the
high school level of scholarship, is probably a good place to begin.) He took careful notes about the life and
times of Bismarck and the Germany of that time. Lots of good stuff in there about wars, treaties, and kings named
Wilhelm and Napoleon. Before he knew
it he had enough notes for a Paper, maybe even more than enough. For a day or two he tried to think about whether
they added up to Bismarck's being a Good Thing or a Bad Thing, but he couldn't
be sure. Then came the night before the
assignment was due, and without an idea in his head, and his desk covered with
undigested notes from the encyclopedia, the result was predictable. He copied out this and that paragraph,
stitching them together in what seemed to him a coherent manner. At three a.m. almost anything seemed
coherent to him, and all those paragraphs so laboriously acquired, copied and
classified seemed as much his property as the paper he wrote them on.
Sure
enough, the professor found plagiarism, and reported the case to the Board on
Academic Honesty. We looked at the documentation
and it was decisive. The assignment had
said, "Do your own work, and do not use any secondary sources." The student had plainly copied from a
secondary source, of course, but if one were to look into his mind late that
night before the assignment was due one would probably have found him thinking
that he sure as hell was "doing his own work."
What
is "his own work," if not studying from books and then telling the
teacher what he had learned? Was he
supposed to invent original information about Bismarck? As for those copied words, well, there
really wasn't any better way to say them.
They were pretty ordinary words, after all, like "By the Treaty of
Westphalia, the signatory powers were obliged to..." Would it have been any more honest to have
changed that to "The nations that signed the Treaty of Westphalia agreed
to..."? And as for that part about
not using "secondary sources," that was plain impossible. Wasn't the professor himself a secondary
source, and hadn't the whole class been talking about Germany for weeks and
weeks, and hadn't there been two books the class had to read? Was he supposed to forget all that while
writing the paper; was he to empty his mind for fear of using a "secondary
source?" After all, he might
have read that encyclopedia article a year or two earlier; could anyone prove
otherwise? Would he in that case have
been compelled to forget that information while preparing his paper?
Well,
there is no telling what other rationalizations this particular student might
have provided for himself as he prepared his paper. I expect he knew it was a cheap job, but that he did not really
believe, until called to account, that he was being dishonest. What was our verdict?
We
were lenient. We recommended to the
Dean that the student be admonished, notified that the paper was an unacceptable
plagiarism, and that a second such offense, if brought to our attention,
would merit a serious punishment. The
professor should be notified, we said, that we had found that the paper rather
willfully failed to answer the assignment; it should be given a zero (not
merely "E") grade. We did not
require that the student be failed in the course, though this might well be the
consequence of the zero when taken together with the rest of the semester's
performance. The professor, if he felt
kindly disposed, might allow the student to make up the assignment to improve
the term grade, and to demonstrate improvement in his understanding of
scholarly virtue, but that was up to the professor.
What
we did not do, though the student needed it, was to instruct the student on
exactly what he should have done in this particular assignment. Nor did we instruct the professor on how he
could have rephrased his assignment to make its intention unmistakable to an
inexperienced freshman. As a court we
are unable to give the time to such instruction in individual cases, but I
believe it is our duty to publish from time to time the results of our
experience.
(I
have in fact written a number of articles for the student newspaper at my
university, during the time I served as judge of these things. It is deplorable that in many colleges the
law describes the offenses in such general terms, and the probable punishments
not at all. Students of a felonious
disposition might be inhibited by advance knowledge of how unoriginal their
intended scams in fact are, and how easily detected, as well as by knowing how
their predecessors were dealt with. And
students like the one who wrote from the encyclopedia on Bismarck might learn
less painfully the same lesson as the one administered by our court.)
Originality
and Secondary Sources
One
feature of the Bismarck case was that the assignment included the phrase
"without using secondary sources."
It seems to me that an assignment to write a paper "without using secondary
sources" is a poor idea.
Impossible, in fact, if the injunction be taken literally, even were the
assignment to write an original poem.
Dreaming or waking, could Coleridge have written Kubla Khan
without secondary sources?
Professors
themselves never follow such a rule when they write papers. Scholars who write use everything in
sight. They spend months in libraries
or museums, and their sources are primary, secondary and tertiary, old and
new, German and Latin and English, sacred and profane, true and
fraudulent. It is not their scholarly
duty to draw only on what is already in their minds, but rather to tell the
reader both what they have arrived at and how it was come by.
This
last is the essence of all scholarship, whether humanistic or scientific. Students should be assigned to imitate this
behavior, and understand its purpose and its method, even if the student
result is of no intrinsic value and displays no novelty. Of course all professors know this, and in
proper contexts they do indeed give such assignments, but they sometimes think
they have another purpose in forbidding the secondary sources. For one thing, it apparently discourages
plagiarism. On the positive side, it
would seem to encourage thought, mental effort and study of the original
information (like the novel on which the critique is to be written), rather
than a regurgi-tation of someone else's commentary. And to a professor it might also seem that he is benefiting the
student by explicitly relieving him of the obligations of extensive library
research.
There
is in this point of view a rather romantic notion of the possibilities for
originality in the mind of the undergraduate.
The professor as scholar would consider himself slothful if he wrote a
paper on (say) "poetic justice in Hamlet" without first
apprising himself of pretty near everything that had been written on the
subject before. But then he turns
around and asks the undergraduate to do precisely otherwise. Saul Bellow, after a public reading of some
of his own work, was once asked by a student how the budding writer should go
about developing an original style.
"You start by imitating your betters," was the answer. This is where a student critic should begin,
too.
But
for many professors there is another purpose to the prohibition. The writing of the paper is intended to be
analogous to the writing of an examination, where students are monitored in
an examination room and forbidden to use anything but their mental equipment,
or sometimes a limited resource, like the textbook. The purpose of the exercise, they might say, is not the
elicitation of a doubtful originality, but rather a check on whether the
student had been "covering the assigned material."
For
this purpose, however, the assignment --- to write a paper outside of class
"without using secondary sources" --- suffers from the same defect as
does an examination without proctors:
it is insecure. Furthermore, if
the information wanted is merely whether the student had been doing the
reading, and understanding it, then a few short factual questions answered
in a literal examination room will serve more surely and more easily than will
the assignment of a critical paper.
What
will accomplish both purposes, the check on the reading and the encouragement
of thinking about it, and a third purpose, the education of the student in
scholarly practice, and indeed a fourth purpose, which is to give that student
some appreciation of what the scholarly world has accomplished in our time, is
an assignment that goes something like this:
"If
you have some original ideas on poetic justice and Hamlet, please write
them up and turn them in. If you can't
think of any, or if you think you may be off the track in what you think, go
ahead and use the library, or even use that notorious set of crib-sheets called
Cliff's Notes, or your fraternity brother's paper on Hamlet from last
year (but please notice that I didn't ask about poetic justice last year). I warn you, however, that the more of this
stuff you use the more of a scholar you'll have to be. Your bibliography will have to
include all of it, and the footnotes will become burdensome. Other people's work may be a help to your
thoughts, but you will have the duty of acknowledgement.
"Still,
go ahead. In many places I am willing
to let you off easy. You will be able
to write, for example, 'As Cliff's notes indicates, ...' without citing page
and line, as a professional scholar might have to do; that's o.k. with
me. But you must not use even an idea
without telling me where you got it.
Using other people's ideas is no sin; there is no other way to learn, at
least at the beginning (cf. Saul Bellow).
What I will not tolerate is your passing those ideas off as having been
strictly your own.
"One
warning. If every idea you express
turns out to have come directly and undigested from Cliff's Notes, or
from your fraternity brother, your paper will not get much of a grade, even if
it is knee-deep in acknowledgements. I want
you to exhibit to me that you have read and understood Hamlet, at least on the
primary level of what it is about, what it says, who gets killed and why, and I
want you to exhibit an understanding of the other things you've read,
including good old Cliff. You are not,
repeat not, to pretend to a knowledge or an understanding you do not
have. Get all the help you can find,
even as I do when studying a new problem."
Note: Since the giving of the assignment is one of
the crucial features of any attack on the problem of academic dishonesty, we
will come back to this subject in Chapter 5, The Assignment, where
another professorial monologue, similar to this one, will illustrate a somewhat
different emphasis.
Model
Solutions
There
is something else the professor should do, that comes halfway between
forbidding the use of models ("no secondary sources") and requiring
them, complete with footnotes, bibliography and a burdensome session in the
library. The professor should exhibit
to his students models of what students in the past had submitted in
answer to the sort of assignment he is giving now, with explanations of how
these old papers did or did not answer the assignment.
"Imitate
your betters" is sometimes not even possible, after all, when the betters
are so much better as to be out of sight.
To ask a freshman for a 1000 word commentary on an event in ancient Rome
is quite reasonable, but to offer him Gibbon as an example of how this should
be done is ridiculous. To forbid
the reading of Gibbon is equally ridiculous.
What the student needs to learn is how an idea or a chapter of Gibbon
(say) can be brought to bear on the problem at hand, and then how to write the
result in such a way that it is clear what part of the exposition was due to
Gibbon and what part to the student and his other reading. But it is not to be expected that the undergraduate,
even having done his work well, will sound like Gibbon. He won't even sound like his own professor,
as we all know.
For
younger students scholarly papers and books, however essential to their
education, are still in many ways inappropriate as models. They are not 1000 words long, and they are
intended to be original, to enlighten their audiences, not merely show that the
author has learned something every professional more or less knows
already. If an average student is to
imitate his betters in minor exercises in the forms of scholarship, let him
begin by imitating better students, studying student papers selected by
his professor from recent years, before going on to greater profundity as his
experience accumulates. (Not that he
shouldn't also, and even primarily, read the greatest literature he can find;
only that he must be more modest in finding models for his own writing for classroom
purposes.)
In
teaching mathematics (my own subject) there is something we do that corresponds
to this idea: We assign exercises, and
then, after having read or graded them we hand back a set of model solutions to
those very exercises, solutions in just the detail and style we would expect
from students. While it is not usual to
do so, it would also be good to make photocopies of some of their
solutions, the ones that exhibit characteristic errors, or maybe worthwhile
devices of the sort most students should have been expected to discover for
themselves. This kind of thing is done
in courses in expository writing, and in workshops in creative writing, where
new work is read aloud or passed around in typescript and then criticized by
the members of the class as well as the professor. It is also done in graduate seminars, of course, where a more elaborate
student research paper is often the basis for discussion. But at the early undergraduate level in the
humanities and social sciences, realistic models are almost never shown or
explained to the students. It is in
papers at this level that, apart from copying in examinations, the largest
amount of student academic dishonesty is found.
I
discovered the value of such models myself, quite by accident, when I was in
my second semester of college, at the University of Michigan in 1942. The course was called Expository Writing,
and the professor was an unforgettable crank named Amos Morris, who had some
theories of prose meter by which he thought to analyze the rhythms of good
prose in the way that poetry is analyzed by conventional prosody.
Professor
Morris assigned us a thousand-word paper each week. The first few papers were on various simple subjects, like what
we had done last summer, or what we remembered of our grandparents, but then
our later assignments were mainly to analyze our own previous papers, using the
categories of analysis he was teaching us in class, that is, his own theories
of prose metrics and so on.
I
was stumped, and I well remember the pain of each Thursday evening when I had
to put together something I had spent the week worrying about, and the pain of
each Monday, when the paper came back with a grade of C or C+. I was not used to grades that low. In the sixth week of the course I went to
see Professor Morris; it was a routine meeting, such as every English professor
had with everybody in the class, probably twice a semester.
I
asked Professor Morris why my grades were so low. He said C+ was not "low"; my work was quite satisfactory.
I said I thought I should get an A in the course, or at least that I
wanted to. He said he thought I could
not, that my writing was simply not that good.
And then I got the inspiration to ask to see some papers written by
students in my class which did have an A grade, and he had the good sense to
tell me to sit in a chair in the corner of his office and read three or four
such papers he happened to have on his desk.
While I was reading them he went on with his next student interview.
I
do not remember the subject of that week's paper, but I do know that the
samples I read were particularly illuminating because I had myself been
struggling with the same assignment just a few days before. I also do not recall whether those papers
were good ones from a literary point of view, or from a scientific point of
view, but I know I did learn from them what he, Professor Morris, considered a
first-class student response to his assignment. And that it was sure different from what I had been doing. And so, for the rest of the semester, I
wrote and handed in only "A" papers.
And I did get my A in the course.
There
are those who exalt originality to such a degree that they would contemn my
method of getting an A from Professor Morris.
They are wrong. I was seventeen
years old at the time, and I was to have courses from perhaps forty different
professors over the course of my academic career. If I could have learned just what pleased each of the forty as
well as I learned how to write something to impress Amos Morris, my repertory
of scholarly devices would have been something to be proud of. This is training, not sycophancy, and for
those of us who are not geniuses there is time enough for such originality as
we are capable of when we are grown and gone from college.
My
later papers for Morris were not plagiarisms.
I did use models, but I did not make copies; I imitated my betters, but
I did not repeat their work. I might
mention that the second sentence of this paragraph, the sentence just before
this one, with the semicolon in the middle and parallel construction throughout,
is of a form that was especially pleasing to Professor Morris, may he rest in
peace. He called it a "periodic
sentence," and the example of it that he gave our class was, "He
went his way; I went mine." Good
example. Not only does it illustrate
the 'periodicity' he was speaking of, but (as literary criticism has since
taught me to recognize) it illustrates his personal philosophy, too. If a different drummer were anywhere around,
Morris would hear.
I
used periodic sentences profusely to get my A; old Morris couldn't resist
them. To this day I have to be careful
not to overuse the device.
Cheating
Unlike
plagiarism, the definition of cheating on examinations offers few
difficulties. Typically, the student is
expected to come into an examination room empty-handed except for pen and
paper, and maybe a hand calculator, and answer the set questions with every device
he can command from his own memory and wit.
He is not to copy a neighbor's paper, or look at it for information, or
talk to a neighbor, or consult a document smuggled in from the outside. But that is only what is typical of a
setting that can be monitored; examinations and other assignments subject to
cheating are sometimes more complicated.
For
example, some examinations are called "take-home." This is often the most important examination
of the term, the final assignment, where what is required is extensive and not
to be done in a single three-hour sitting.
It could be a computer program that is asked for, in a course in
engineering or in computer science, or a set of calculations in some other
science, or even a critique of some length for a course in literature --- a
task for which some leisure should be granted the student if the
professor is to get a good idea of what the student has learned, or can do.
Take-home
examinations are generally accompanied by instructions concerning the degree
of outside help the student may call on.
In some cases the test is "open-book," meaning that the
student can consult the textbook, the library, and his own notes, but is forbidden
to ask help from any other person.
Or, he may also be forbidden to use any book except the textbook
(because other books sometimes are the source of the problem assigned, or are
known by the professor to contained detailed instructions concerning problems
of the type assigned).
All
this sounds fair enough, and not much different from the assigning of a term
paper as is common in English or History courses. But where a student writing a term paper has no difficulty
talking to his roommate about the paper, even when the roommate is also trying
to answer the "same" assignment, things are different in
examinations. Two students asked to say
something particular about poetic justice in Hamlet may quite honestly
discuss Hamlet at length, and argue the point, and yet turn in substantially different
analyses, each his own work as asked.
But two students asked to write up the same lab experiment, composing a
computer program to organize the data in such a way that certain consequences
are made clear, cannot discuss what they propose with each other without
arriving at a similar document, because such an assignment (often) has
essentially only one correct answer.
That's what makes it an examination rather than a paper.
Our
court has had several cases of assignments of just this sort, where two or
three (in one case, four) students who were suite-mates in the college
dormitories were taking the same course.
This is common; students with the same interests often live together and
talk over their studies day after day.
They learn together, as people do who work together at Kodak or Xerox
(two notable Rochester companies), and though after a time it becomes clear who
is the clever one who can usually provide the answer to a tough problem, it
still cannot be said that they don't all learn from one another. This sort of thing is, and should be,
encouraged. Kodak and Xerox certainly
do.
Then,
of a sudden, the roommates are forbidden to talk about the very thing that is
most on their minds: the final exam question they have just brought home with
them. A whole week of this. They eat together, and go out for beer and
pizza together at 2 a.m. Can anyone
imagine that one of them will not say "I'm having a bit of a rough time
with #3"? So Mr. A does say it,
and his roommate Mr. B mentions that the
professor discussed something of the sort on that Thursday when A was
absent. "Did I get the notes from
you that day?" asks A, and B says, "No, I don't think so. Gee, I gave you all the others you missed;
how could we have forgotten that one?"
Observe
that there has as yet been no cheating on the exam. Friends can talk to each other, after all. And now Mr. B gets out the notes for the
December 4 lecture that A had missed, and that in the course of things he might
very well have given A at the time, but which contains exactly what Mr. A (or
anyone else in the class) would need to answer Final Examination Question
#3. But there is a catch. Mr B didn't really understand that December
4 lecture, and his transcription of the professor's words turns out to be a
bit garbled. Mr. A reads the notes and
cannot understand them. He asks B if he
is sure the notes are right. B looks
again and is puzzled; he thinks it's right, but since his understanding
of recursively enumerable functions has always been dim he can't tell. He asks C, the third suitemate, who also
doesn't understand the material very well, and C gets his own notes to compare
with the others. Before long all three
friends are converging on a common text, which turns out to be wrong in a very
peculiar way, quite meaningless, actually.
No cheaters here, or are there?
At what moment in this process did the cheating begin?
The
three friends then write their own separate solutions to Question #3, and the
rest of the test. The morning the papers
are due in the professor's office, Mr. D, a friend who lives elsewhere, comes
around to see how everyone's doing. He
is on his way to the Computer Science Building with his own paper and offers to
take the three roommates' papers along, saving them the trip. They give him their papers. C knows him well, and all three have often
studied with him. He wouldn't cheat,
they believe --- actually, they don't even think about it --- and besides, the
exam is due in half an hour.
But
the three friends were wrong: D does
read their papers, on his way over to turn them in, because he had trouble with
Question #1. He hasn't much time, so he
copies #1 from the paper that looks best to him, hurriedly, and then deposits
all four papers in the professor's mailbox at the crack of 10:00 a.m. when
they are due. The professor turns up
five minutes later and collects the lot.
What
does the professor discover? A, B, and
C have practically identical garbled replies to Question #3, that could not
have happened by chance. As long as he
is looking at these three papers he checks whether #1, among others, shows
signs of collusion. They don't, quite,
but by golly B's #1 is identical with D's.
He then reports all four students to our court.
Supposing
the court actually finds out, through internal evidence and the reports of the
students, exactly what happened, as outlined above; who is guilty of what? D is plainly a cheat by any standard, but
did A, B, and C, collaborate in his cheating by giving him their papers in time
for him to copy part of them? And the
collaboration of the original three:
is it cheating to show a fellow student exactly that passage of a
(legal) notebook that is needed to answer a question on an exam? One might argue that using so pointed a
reference (though in this case it was an incorrect transcription) constitutes
"not submitting your own work."
But if the class notes were legal to use, the crime must have taken
place in the conversation and not in the consultation of the notes. But the conversation was not what produced
the document. And can't roommates even
talk?
Well,
they were all found guilty of something; this is not the place to
describe the verdict. The professor was
also found guilty of something, but our charter as a court did not permit us to
punish him. The professor had given a
poor examination, one that did not admit of security. It was pure luck that enabled him to discover the most egregious
of the offenses, the copying by D of B's Problem #1. If the ambiguous collaboration of the three roommates had not
attracted his attention to B's paper as a whole, the similarity of the copied
problem would have passed notice, because correct answers are usually
similar. Only when for some reason they
are placed side-by-side and studied will actual identity exhibit itself. Then how many other cases of copied answers
went undetected by this professor in this very insecure examination? An answer copied at leisure can be changed
enough in appearance to evade suspicion.
I
cannot believe that the nature of the subject ever makes it necessary for
examinations containing numerical problems or mathematical proofs of limited
scope to be conducted "at-home."
Lengthy projects, yes. But there
the document must either be honest or purchased from a ghost writer; for no
amount of mere discussion or consultation of notes will eventuate in identical
papers. If the professor is seriously
interested in finding out what the student knows and can do, so that he can
give that student a grade that compares him honestly with his classmates, the
professor must find a secure way of giving the examination. The matter of
necessarily lengthy assignments such as term papers will take a separate
discussion.
Ralph
A. Raimi
May
17, 2004