Each semester, one U. Texas chemistry lecturer has at least 50 students in his or her classes who are unknowingly guilty of cheating when they use old information gleaned from online sources to answer exam, textbook or homework questions.
Chemistry lecturer Conrad Fjetland said most of these students — who use Web sites like CourseHero.com, a “social learning network” — do not understand that using these materials is considered plagiarism. Course Hero and similar sites provide students with specific course information compiled from real classes and assignments. Its Facebook page currently has 265,415 fans.
“Using these sites as study aids is one thing, but when you go there specifically to find answers, that’s when you’ve crossed the line,” he said. “Some students don’t really specifically understand what plagiarism is. That’s the most common [example of cheating] I see. I basically tell the students that if you go to these sites and you look at this report, you have officially cheated in the course.”
In 2008-09, there were 1,089 reported academic and non-academic cases, which include disruptive classroom behavior and cheating. Of those cases, 421 resulted from academic dishonesty, which includes plagiarism and unauthorized collaboration. Faculty members who are unable to resolve issues with a particular student can send the case to the office’s Student Judicial Services, a body that can either hold a hearing to determine disciplinary action or give an administrative disposition in which a student agrees with the charges and waives his or her right to a hearing. Of the reported academic dishonesty cases, 186 were referred to judicial services in the 2008-2009 year, but only seven students were suspended from UT for academic dishonesty.
Rutgers University management and global business professor Donald McCabe, whose expertise includes college cheating, said there is data to support the assertion that engineering students cut corners more often than liberal arts students. McCabe said engineering students use solution manuals to solve problems in their textbooks to manage their time more effectively.
“They’ll particularly do that in courses where they feel they know the material and where there is really no learning value and it’s just busy work, as far as they’re concerned,” McCabe said. “I’m sure [using the solution manual] starts as just busy work, but it becomes a habit. I think they’ve convinced themselves, for whatever reason, that it’s not cheating.”
According to a 2002 report by Stanford University computer science professor Eric Roberts, computer science students have made up the largest portion of any Stanford college in academic violations of the Stanford honor code since 1990. One of the reasons cheating is so prevalent in computer science is that computer homework assignments are re-used from year to year to work out bugs. The risk of this method is that students can easily access past assignments.
Tracy Mitrano, director of IT Policy, Computer Policy and Law Programs at Cornell, said the information available to a student far surpasses that of 20 years ago and that it’s easy to just copy information to complete a homework requirement.
“The availability of the information and the social norms of how people are using it have changed in such a way that we’re crossing a line into cheating and plagiarism,” Mitrano said.
She said the most important step universities can take is to educate their students about the pitfalls of the information age.
“Too much has changed that we haven’t kept up with,” she said. “We can’t assume now that if we just say, ‘By the way, everyone is subject to the academic integrity [honor] code,’ that everyone really knows what that means. We really have to talk about how students study, how they use information technology and what the expectation is for original thought on a paper or a problem set.”