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Wandering Eyes — Part 2
That's what scares many professors.
As they grow wise to their students' ways, they're making discoveries
that seem to suggest that there is a lot more cheating going on
than anyone imagined — and worse, nearly everyone is getting
away with it. After hearing reports that his students were reusing
papers for his introductory physics course, for example, University
of Virginia professor Louis Bloomfield ran 1,500 assignments through
a computer program he designed to look for possible plagiarism.
In spring 2001, he accused 122 students of copying others' work,
initiating one of the highest-profile cheating scandals in modern
academia. Eventually, forty-five students were kicked out of school,
and three more had their degrees revoked.
The Virginia case may be the most prominent weed growing through
the ivy, but it's far from the only one. Scandals have surfaced
at universities throughout the United States and in places like
China and Australia. And UW-Madison has certainly not been immune.
From 1996 to 2002, 490 cases of academic misconduct were formally
reported to the dean of students office, resulting in sanctions
ranging from lowered grades to suspension from the university.
 Not
included in that total are twenty-seven accounting students who
were accused this April of improperly collaborating on a take-home
exam. According to accounting department chair John Eichenseher,
the students were allowed to complete the exam outside of class
so that they would be free to attend a business school guest lecture.
The speaker? Sherron Watkins, the Enron whistleblower who brought
to light the company's shady accounting practices.
These students are, of course, merely the ones who got caught.
It's hard to know how much cheating really goes on: the goal of
all cheats, after all, is to go undetected, and it's probably safe
to assume that the vast majority of them succeed. About the only
way to assess how many students really are cheating is to ask them
to fess up.
Researchers began doing that in the 1940s, arriving on college
campuses with armfuls of anonymous surveys that pried from students
information about their past transgressions. The measures obviously
aren't perfect, relying as they do on people being honest about
their dishonesty. But the results have shown a definite trend over
time. Most surveys done in the forties observed that less than one-quarter
of students admitted to cheating on an assignment at any point during
college. Now, using the same methods, researchers find that 50 to
80 percent of students own up to the deed. One 1994 study reported
that 89.9 percent of undergraduate students said that they had cheated
at least once in college.
"It's getting to be more and more of a problem, and we know
less and less what to do about it," says James WollackMA'93,
PhD'96, an associate scientist in the School of Education's Testing
and Evaluation Services office, which, among other things, tries
to help professors design cheat-resistant tests and testing environments.
In 1996, Wollack set out to discover the extent of UW-Madison's
cheating problem. Instead of asking students if they'd cheated at
any point in the past, which he considered vague and inconclusive,
he visited a dozen undergraduate classes immediately after an exam
and administered an anonymous survey about that one test. About
5 percent of the respondents said they had copied answers from someone
else during the exam.
That number — which doesn't even attempt to quantify plagiarism
or other forms of cheating that go on outside exam rooms —
adds up fast. Based on that ratio, if someone were to give the whole
campus an examination, you could bet that more than two thousand
students would have a case of wandering eyes.
"The data show it's happening every time a test goes on,"
he says. "Over four or five years of college, that's a lot
of opportunities to cheat. I think it's very serious news."
1, 2, 3, 4,
5, 6
On Wisconsin Home
Page
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Wandering Eyes
- The Dean of Students Office publishes Student
Conduct and Disciplinary Rules outlining the rights and responsibilities
for student conduct at UW-Madison.
- University of Virginia professor Louis Bloomfield accused 122
students of copying the work of others in one of the highest-profile
cheating
scandals in modern academia.
- West Point is legendary for its code of honor. Learn about the
objectives and procedures of the West
Point Honor System.
Fall 2003 Features
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