As stress builds and deadlines approach, some students see cheating as the only viable option to save their endangered GPAs. To students, cheating might seem like a quick and painless way to remedy a study plan gone wrong, but campus officials take a far less forgiving view. \nThey condemn all accounts of academic dishonesty and warn students that they will be caught. \nCheating is nothing new, as students have been attempting to pass off others' work as their own for years. Jack Dvorak, IU professor of journalism, knows this first hand, recalling an incident when a student rather carelessly and humorously made an attempt at plagiarism.\nHis students had been given a few weeks to write an article profiling a person they found interesting and newsworthy. The student of interest had exhibited fairly poor academic performance, Dvorak said, and he didn't expect a stellar piece of journalism. But that's what he received when the student wrote a profile of a basketball player for the Denver Nuggets.\nDvorak said he was suspicious and decided that running the first few lines through an online search engine would not be a bad idea.\n"I tried to track down an article on the computer and found that nearly every passage was verbatim in Sports Illustrated Online," he said.\nThough the student's inability to consider the obviously small probability of producing such a stellar interview in such a short period of time was lacking, there was a greater issue at hand: a sheer lack of academic integrity. \nDvorak said the student failed the assignment and ultimately, though not directly related to the cheating incident, also failed the course.\nInstances of plagiarism are not the only examples of academic dishonesty. Pam Freeman, IU dean of student ethics, presented statistics documenting 292 instances of academic misconduct in the 2002-2003 school year. And although 150 -- more than 50 percent of all cases of academic dishonesty -- were classified as plagiarism last year, students have several other cheating options.
Online translators thwart bilingualism\nIn the past, Sean McGuire, a course supervisor in the department of Spanish and Portuguese, has had to deal with students who have used technology as a cheating tool. The most pressing issue of academic misconduct in the foreign language departments is the prevalence of online language translators. But McGuire said he has found instances of online translator usage to be fairly simple to detect.\n"Translators have not been perfected yet," he said. "They can be literal in their errors."\nMany of the translators swap English words with Spanish words, but they fail to take each language's sentence organization into account. Sometimes programs even fail to translate certain words, leaving students with multi-lingual sentences. Students who turn in assignments with these jumbled sentences make the cheater-identification process much easier for the professors.\n"The Spanish department has responded to this new tool by requiring fewer out-of-class assignments and integrating writing into classroom activities," he said. \nMcGuire said that unlike other classes where the ideas within the language are the most important, introductory Spanish concerns itself primarily with the student's ability to produce clear language. When students use online translators, they don't present honest portrayals of their progress in mastering a language.
The easy way out of 'K-two-no-fun'\nBusiness class K201 has the reputation for being a serious and difficult course. In the past, students have even dubbed the computer-business course "K-two-no-fun." Bill Littlefield, a K201 course coordinator, said the course catches more cheaters than nearly any other class in the business school.\n"We catch an awful lot of students," Littlefield said. "In each section, it's going to vary, but [we catch] anyplace from 20 to 30 cases a semester out of 1,500 students."\nIn each case, academic misconduct charges are always filed. As for punishments, Littlefield said they differ on a case by case basis, but students could potentially fail the course.\n"The penalty has to be greater than a zero for the assignment, that's the same as not turning it in," he said.\nLittlefield has also found students to be quite uninhibited in their quests to cheat. One incident involved a class where the same project passed between seven groups, totaling 21 students.\n"Files were passed from one student to another student to a third student and the first and third didn't even know each other," he said. \nIn its efforts to combat such instances, the business school has made great strides in eliminating opportunities for cheating. It has developed password-protected project submissions programs that track students' files, and the Microsoft programs the school uses are also equipped with tools capable of catching cheaters. Most important to the business school, however, is not just catching cheaters, but stopping the formation of life-long habits. \n"If this sort of illegal behavior provides them benefits in college, it will carry over to their careers," Littlefield said.
Plagiarizing papers\nKathy Smith, the English department's composition program coordinator, has seen all sorts of plagiarism. It's characterized, she said, by its deliberate intent to deceive. \n"Primarily, it's students who have turned in papers almost verbatim off the Web or turned in other students' papers," she said.\nSeveral steps have been taken to eliminate such instances. The most important of these being education, Smith said. No student who takes an IU introductory writing class like W131 should leave that semester without a solid understanding of just what constitutes plagiarism. If students have had one of those courses, ignorance is never an acceptable excuse.\nAfter education, the English department turns to its next invaluable resource: its team of well-trained assistant instructors.\n"Because nearly all W131 students are writing the same type of assignments, it's very easy for AIs to ask each other if they had a paper with certain things in it turned in in one of their classes," Smith said.\nShe urges students to really consider the consequences of cheating. \n"In an academic community," she said, "there is just no place for cheating."
A campus wide problem\nAcademic misconduct affects every department at IU, and Freeman maintains that the price students pay for academic dishonesty reaches much further than their transcript.\n"They are forgetting that the process is also important, not just the product," she said. "[Cheating] undermines faculty members' efforts and prohibits new learning."\nThough far from the levels of an epidemic, these combined instances affect each member of IU's community of nearly 40,000 students, Freeman said.\n"In the broadest context, it undermines the value of the IU degree."\n-- Contact staff writer Chris Sommerfeld at csommerf@indiana.edu.
