Procedural problems with academic misconduct

By the time you reach college, there’s little excuse for failing to understand the definition and severity of cheating or plagiarism.

Most classes at IU lay down the rules about academic misconduct on day one during the syllabus review.

IU takes academic violations seriously, because they damage its reputation as a top public research university, not to mention offenders undermine their own education while cheating their peers who play by the rules.

But in the process of holding students accountable to University policy, faculty members must also be accountable to students and to the institution.

For example, if professors suspect one of their students cheated on a test, they are required to send an academic misconduct report to the dean of students within 14 days of concluding that the violation occurred.

This practice is important to the University, because it allows IU to detect and track offenders, including those who cheat or plagiarize repeatedly. Without it, it would be harder for IU to record academic misconduct in students’ disciplinary files.

Students accused of academic violations also benefit.

While the reports expose students to further disciplinary action by the Dean of Students, the Dean also sends students information about appealing an erroneous finding or a disproportionate sanction as part of the campus judicial process.

Occasionally, faculty members step outside that process when they fail to submit reports or submit them on time.

This prevents IU from holding students accountable to the faculty member’s own judgment. Just as significantly, it cheats the student out of an opportunity to seek relief for an erroneous accusation or a draconian penalty.

In addition to making sure professors report academic misconduct when it occurs, we should have clearer rules on what happens to students caught in an end-of-semester academic misconduct accusation, where the student’s future enrollment could be affected.

According to the procedures governing the campus judicial system, a student can receive an incomplete in a class if his misconduct is not resolved before final grades are due.

This would seem to contradict a rule in the same document that states IU will not put sanctions in place until a student exhausts his appeals, and that the work a student performs while he has an ongoing misconduct issue is dependent on the outcome of his hearing.

A student can use a grade appeal to retroactively correct his grade if he is absolved of wrongdoing, but if the course were a prerequisite or a time-sensitive requirement, the student’s educational experience could be adversely affected.

Thus, faculty members should consistently give students accused of academic violations the grades they would receive if they were not responsible for misconduct, changing the grades as required by the final rulings on the violations.

Faculty members are intimately knowledgeable about their work and are rightly trusted to be the vanguard of detecting and punishing plagiarism and cheating.

But they, too, are beholden to a set of rules.

In dealing with academic misconduct, professors must grant students due process and should be held accountable when they don’t.

Additionally, the incomplete, reduced and failing grades they issue in response to academic violations should be treated like any other sanction IU issues and be withheld until a final decision is made about a violation.

IU’s academic integrity is of the utmost importance, but so, too, are standards of judgment that engender fairness, consistency and trust.

­— danoconn@indiana.edu