I’ll be frank. I only know a few things about cheating at the university level. First off, I really dislike being one of the few schmucks who doesn’t think cheating is appropriate in graduate-level public health classes. Second, there’s a lot more cheating happening on the Charles River Campus than anyone acknowledges. Finally, the small number — 85 — of academic misconduct cases reported last year in the College of Arts and Sciences indicates that most cheaters are getting away with it.
Cheating is, by its very nature, an underground endeavor. It’s hard to track because only the bad (or unlucky) cheaters get caught. It might take place surreptitiously (graduate students neglecting to footnote their ideas, for instance) or more obviously (glancing over at your neighbor’s blue book during a final exam). Cases of academic misconduct sometimes border on the unbelievable — one particularly dense student at my alma mater, the University of California-Davis, plagiarized directly from her professor’s published papers.
A friend claims that widespread cheating is indicative of the larger decline of civilization; thankfully, I’m not that pessimistic. But in the realm of cheating at BU, there’s something much more alarming than fraternity members passing along their frat brothers’ previously-turned-in “A” essays.
What really worries me is when professors choose, for one reason or another, to ignore cases of academic misconduct, which neither punishes the students nor follows university guidelines. I know of a number of cases in which graduate student teaching assistants caught students cheating and reported them to the professors — and the professors chose not to do anything. Cheating is a problem, but letting cheating continue unabated is a bigger problem.
Graduate students who work as teaching assistants in CAS are put in a particularly difficult position when they identify cases of cheating and professors choose not to do anything. They can’t take cases directly to the college, which would require them talking to someone higher up on the food chain. Not only would this put the graduate student in a very uncomfortable position, but CAS also has no mechanism for graduate students to report cases.
I’m troubled by all of this. Sometime soon I’ll be a poorly paid teaching assistant expected to round up ornery bands of cheaters with only my bare hands and a trusty Google search function. But after I lasso all the cheaters and stash them in my basement/dungeon office, what am I going to do with them? The law of the land says mob justice is inappropriate, so calling my grad student friends and forcing the cheaters to listen to us all talk about our dissertation research (a truly traumatizing experience) and then do all of my ironing is out of the question. Being an upright citizen, I’d have to report these cases to a faculty member.
Kerrie Parkington, who deals with cases of academic misconduct in CAS, acknowledges that there’s no accurate way of determining how much cheating is going on or how often faculty report cases of academic misconduct. She is, however, upbeat about the effectiveness of current practices, since there were a record-high 85 cases in CAS reported last year.
“If we’re getting one, two, three or even 10 students, I’d be concerned,” Parkington said. “But 80 to 100 students per year is a lot.”
While I’d like to be optimistic and think 85 instances of academic misconduct are a large portion of the total, everything in me rebels against that idea. Common sense, conversations with current teaching assistants and my own experience all conflict with Ms. Parkington’s rosy analysis. A friend told me that in his four semesters of TA-ing, he spied cheaters during every exam except the one he proctored himself, and received at least one plagiarized paper every class. If this is what a single TA is reporting, I’m loath to believe 85 cases is more than a very small fraction of the total.
Like I said at the beginning, I only know a few things about cheating at the university level, and how to solve this problem is not one of them. But if the university was really serious about cracking down on cheating, helping out graduate students and convincing faculty members to report academic misconduct, administrators could surely come up with some new policies.
I really hope changes are made before I start working as a teaching assistant. But if nothing is done before I stand in front of my first section, let me say this: If I catch students cheating or plagiarizing, they won’t be lucky enough to get reported to a faculty member. I learned a thing or two while living in Nigeria, and my personal strategy for cheaters boils down to two words: mob justice.
Melissa Graboyes, a graduate student in the School of Public Health, is a weekly columnist for The Daily Free Press. She can be reached at [email protected].
