Wandering Eyes — Part 6
But professors are not alone. They have a significant
ally in the large community of honest students, who often suffer
tangibly from unchecked deceit. When cheaters claim good grades
that they don't deserve, it's the students who have done the work
who get pushed down the curve.
Andrew Lokuta says much of the street knowledge that he and his
teaching assistants bring into the exam room in Physiology 335 comes
directly from those students who know how to cheat, but don't. If
the instructors let dishonest students slip by, they hear about
it. Lokuta's department has fielded angry e-mails from students
who have seen cheating during exams and want it stopped.
And he understands completely. "This is a very hard class,"
he says. "Students who do well really deserve credit for that.
They don't deserve to be put in the same category as someone who
got there by artificial means. We owe it to the students who are
trying hard."
It was an honest student, as well, who convinced Middlecamp to
persist with the often thankless work of tracking down plagiarists.
She was close to giving up, when Heather Lilla, who served on one
of her student leadership boards, reminded her, "You're doing
it for us."
To professors such as Ralph Cagle, that makes the extraordinary
effort not merely worthwhile, but imperative. "If students
are getting the sense that we're not taking cheating seriously,
it affects a whole different level of student [than just those who
cheat]," he says. "I do worry about the student who comes
to us with high standards, believing that if they play by the rules
they will be rewarded. If we detract from that student's experience
by allowing cheating to go on, we have failed our responsibility
in a big way."
Cagle may have been thinking about a student such as Woodie Mogaka,
whom he encountered a few days earlier at a meeting of the Teaching
Academy, a faculty group that strives to improve instruction and
address classroom issues.
Mogaka, an affable and talented sophomore, was there as part of
a student panel on academic integrity, whose members urged faculty
to keep battling against the cheating problem and offered insights
from their perspective on how it might be curtailed. He had personal
motivation for being on the panel. During the fall semester, he
had gotten a B+ in a class — missing an A by just a few points,
so close he almost could have grabbed it. But the thing that stuck
with him was knowing that other students in the class falsified
lab reports. Not only did they get away with turning in those bogus
reports, he says, but they got good grades on them. Since the class
was graded on a curve, that may have been all it took to rob Mogaka
of his A.
Now, Mogaka can't help feeling resentful about how effective that
strategy was, about how he got knocked down a grade by others who
were half as bright and nowhere near as ethical as he.
When something like that happens, he says, "it softens the
will of those who don't cheat." He has learned a lesson. It
just may not be the right one.
Michael Penn MA'97 is senior editor of On Wisconsin.
To illustrate this story, photographer Jeff Miller
enlisted the help of several student volunteers to recreate various
forms of cheating that take place on college campuses. We're pretty
sure the students pictured in this story don't actually do the things
we made them do.
1, 2, 3,
4, 5, 6
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