CHEATING CULTURE, THE

ASEE Prism, Sep 2004 by Selingo, Jeffrey

CHEATING IS ON THE RISE, BUT MANY PROFESSORS ARE RELUCTANT TO CONFRONT DISHONEST STUDENTS BECAUSE IT'S TOO DIFFICULT TO PROSECUTE THEM.

Last spring, John K. Schneller, professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering at the University of Florida, learned from some seniors in his control-theory class that a few of their classmates had cheated on an exam by whispering answers and showing their papers to one another.

Schneller was surprised. After all, he had proctored the exam along with a teaching assistant and thought his presence in the room would have discouraged cheating. Now he wondered what to do about the next exam. The class had 104 students crammed into a small lecture hall, so prohibiting students from sitting next to one another was impossible.

His solution? The next test would have two versions. When Schneller graded that exam, though, he discovered that one student had answers from the other version. To Schneller, it was a clear-cut exampie of cheating and he decided to pursue charges through the university's judicial system, his first case in 18 years of teaching at the university. "I was told by older faculty not to waste my time," Schneller says.

Now he knows why. The student denied the charges, claiming he was a poor student who had simply arrived at the wrong answers. Mer a formal hearing, the student was acquitted. "Instead of getting the 'F' I wanted to give him, he got a 'D,' " Schneller says. "It was discouraging."

Cheating in college is nothing new, of course. For generations, students have scrawled crib notes on the inside of baseball caps or copied passages out of books for term papers. Now, however, surveys show that cheating among college students - including engineering majors-is getting worse. In 1964, 5 8 percent of engineering students said they had cheated at least once. By 1996, that number had jumped to 82 percent, according to research by Donald L. McCabe, a management professor at Rutgers University who conducts occasional surveys of students and faculty members on the issue. "Students now look at cheating differently," McCabe says. "Students are no longer embarrassed by it."

Schools of engineering on many campuses often rank near the top in the number of cases referred to university judicial panels. At Ohio State, for instance, the college of engineering had 19 percent of the academic misconduct cases on campus in the 200203 academic year, the most of any school on campus. The engineering school at George Washington University had 21 percent of the academic misconduct cases on campus over the same period-the most of any school on campus after arts and sciences, the university's largest. At Georgia Tech, 37 percent of the academic misconduct cases resolved in 2002-03 were from the college of engineering, the most of any school at the university.

It's also easier to cheat today, thanks to technology like the Internet and wireless messaging devices such as cell phones. Professors who turn their back on the problem also help. Unlike Schneller, many faculty members simply ignore or are unaware of the cheating that goes on in their classrooms. More often than not, they choose to handle cases quickly and quietly to avoid the laborious campus judicial process that usually ends in disappointment for them.

In a 2000 survey, McCabe found that one third of professors who said they were aware of a cheating incident in their classroom in the last two years did nothing about it. "An awful lot of faculty [members] don't take cheating as seriously as they should," says Kris Pister, professor of electrical engineering and computer sciences at the University of California-Berkeley. "I don't believe the people who say there is no cheating in their class. I think they are all being naïve."

Pister himself realized the pervasiveness of the problem when he found out several years ago that certain teams of students working on a final project in digital circuit design had shared information with each other. "These were not minor infractions," he says. "There was wholesale copying." He ended up failing 13 students in the class for cheating and referred them to the university's judicial-affairs office.

The situation Pister encountered is a common one. Engineering professors say that sharing homework assignments is probably the most popular form of cheating they encounter these days. One reason, they believe, is that engineers are expected to collaborate in their professional careers, but engineering students are often discouraged from working together on assignments in college. And while some professors clearly spell out in their syllabus that sharing work is prohibited, others are not as clear or actively encourage students to work together. Often, the result is confused students.

That's what Douglas Jones, electrical and computer engineering professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, ran into last fall when he discovered that a quarter of the 130 students in his computer engineering course had worked in groups and copied from other people on programming assignments. Although Jones says his syllabus clearly stated that students were supposed to do their own work, some thought it was acceptable to collaborate since they were allowed to do that in other classes. "It was not an issue that I (had] faced before," says Jones, who has been teaching for 16 years. "I never even stressed that part of my syllabus at the beginning of the semester."