NYTimes: Cheating on an Ethics Test? It’s ‘Topic A’ at Columbia

Parents Forum
1

<p>Shades of Calvin and Hobbes - cheating and grade grubbing is back in the news, but this time with an ironic twist. Quite a few threads ago I mentioned a Calvin and Hobbes strip that posed the question "is it better to do the right thing and fail... or is it better to do the wrong thing and succeed? ...in the real world, people care about success, not principles. ... Then again, maybe that's why the world is in such a mess. What a dilemma!" Dilemma, indeed and especially so (as in the Calvin and Hobbes comic) when the test involved is an ethics test. </p>

<p>
[quote]
Cheating is not unheard of on university campuses. But cheating on an open-book, take-home exam in a pass-fail course seems odd, and all the more so in a course about ethics.

[/quote]
</p>

<p><a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2006/12/01/nyregion/01columbia.html?ref=eduation%5B/url%5D"&gt;http://www.nytimes.com/2006/12/01/nyregion/01columbia.html?ref=eduation&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p>

2

<p>I find that very amusing, but I agree wholeheartedly to the supposition that people care more about the ends than the means. Society is very goal-oriented, and success is ultimately what everyone wants in life. To these grad students, at that age, success means passing a course and get a masters in journalism. I think that it was immoral what they did (or may have not done), but I think many people would cheat, in some sense of the word, in their own situations in order to achieve their own goals.</p>

3

<p>How is this for a theory. There was no cheating incident. The Prof wants to teach the class a lesson in journalistic ethics as they suffer through the press coverage of a rumor.</p>

4

<p>beprepn - to the credit of Columbia faculty and administration, this incident may indeed turn out to be a valuable lesson in academic and professional integrity:</p>

<p>
[quote]
As Columbia University continues to grapple with allegations of cheating on a final exam in a journalism ethics course, students have been assigned to write an essay on an issue that parallels the one faced by their own professors.</p>

<p>The topic: What should a newspaper’s executive editor do after receiving “a tip from a credible source that one or more unspecified articles in recent editions of the newspaper contain fabricated material”?...</p>

<p>The essay, of up to 500 words, is due on Thursday.

[/quote]
</p>

<p><a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2006/12/03/nyregion/03columbia.html%5B/url%5D"&gt;http://www.nytimes.com/2006/12/03/nyregion/03columbia.html&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p>

5

<p>As a one time tenure track faculty at a school that terminated me the second week into my teaching career for not assuring all my MBA students that they would pass my class in Decision Sciences, I can testify that some schools (and maybe many schools) have lower ethical standards than the students that attend classes. Columbia is to be congratulated for doing something about this possible problem.</p>

6

<p>Not surprise I have seen several students cheat in my classes. Also one of my profs told us about several students who were caught cheating on an "Ethics" paper, they went and bought the papers online.</p>

7

<p>Nothing like cheating on an ethics test at a prestigious ivy to make the issue of academic integrity news worthy. It is a good news story, though - especially because cheating and plagarism cases have become all too commonplace these days. The way in which Columbia handles this case is important because it just might influence how other educational institutions deal with cheaters and plagarists. </p>

<p>Most college students do take honor codes seriously and value the intrinsic worth of their education enough not to cheat. Unfortunately, even with honor codes in place, grade grubbing and cheating these days is on the rise - and often it didn't begin in college. At my kids' high school cheating is rampant. Teachers try to stop it and threaten students with zeros on tests, zeros for the term, as well as suspension from school, but they are basically stymied in their efforts to stop it and frustrated because so many of these same students have poor analytical and reasoning skills - and, in some cases, it may even explains why a student's SAT scores don't gibe with grades. </p>

<p>Recently,Inside Higher Ed. ran a good article on this subject: "Traffic School for Essay Thieves"</p>

<p>
[quote]
Having grown weary of punishing students for plagiarizing and advising other professors to fail them, too, Meg Files said that she had an epiphany during a random chat with a colleague at Pima Community College’s West Campus. The professor explained that he had recently gone to traffic school after receiving a ticket and that the course had actually improved his driving.</p>

<p>“So I thought, ‘Why can’t we have a parallel program for plagiarism?’ ” said Files, who chairs Pima’s English/journalism department.</p>

<p>Seizing on the idea, Files created a “traffic school for plagiarism,” aimed at altering the campus’s focus on catching and punishing students for turning in essays they didn’t write. Now students can seek academic rehabilitation instead of punishment by participating in a plagiarism program that contains five steps:</p>

<pre><code> Write a detailed, self-exam on “Why I plagiarized.”

Read case studies of plagiarism. (Files said that many of the examples cover cases of professional journalists fired from their jobs.)

Write a paragraph defining plagiarism.

Meet with a tutor to discuss proper citation etiquette and complete a short worksheet on citations.

Meet with a faculty committee to talk about how to avoid plagiarism and lessons learned.
</code></pre>

<p>Files, who will be overseeing the program, said that it is too early to tell whether it will be successful. Only a few students have elected to sign up, and none have yet finished.</p>

<p>“My reaction is, good for them,” said Donald L. McCabe, founding president of the Center for Academic Integrity. McCabe, a professor of management and global business at Rutgers University, called Pima’s approach a good policy that cuts down the middle between two extremes: excessively punishing students for literary piracy, or ignoring them. McCabe said that his own research finds that plagiarism is slightly more common today than in previous decades and that honor codes help curb the problem.</p>

<p>However, current policies at most educational institution revolve around detection and punishment. A number of universities now use online products such as Turnitin.com to scan essays for stolen text.</p>

<p>While catching students and then failing them for copying does help to reduce plagiarism, McCabe said that it probably doesn’t provide the best results and may just teach students to be more careful when they cheat. “Now we are just teaching students how to avoid detection,” he said.</p>

<p>Instructing students how to correctly reference other work and instilling a sense of academic integrity in them is difficult, McCabe said, but is the best way to dissuade students from plagiarizing.</p>

<p>“I like the focus — the remedial aspect instead of just playing gotcha,” said John P. Lesko, editor of the new scholarly journal, Plagiary. Lesko pointed out that some students may not even know that plagiarism is a bad thing, and that copying is considered normal in some countries...</p>

<p>Files said that cultural differences in defining plagiarism also drove her develop the new program. “In some cultures, plagiarism isn’t bad,” she said. But she also found that the current policies at her institution were not going far enough. In the past, Pima tried to curb plagiarism by assigning original topics, which makes it more difficult for students to purchase an essay, and by emphasizing the writing process—outlining, drafting, revising—over delivering a finished product. Finally, faculty have been encouraging students to be confident and proud of their own writing. She calls these steps “prevention” and the new program a “cure” once plagiarism is found.</p>

<p>“I think it’s a worthwhile effort, but the motivation to plagiarize is huge,” said Colin Purrington, associate professor of evolutionary biology at Swarthmore College. Purrington became so concerned about the growing problem with plagiarism that he put up a complete Web site to address the issue a couple of years ago.</p>

<p>One of the resources he cites as a deterrent against plagiarism is an essay that a Swarthmore student wrote as a disciplinary measure after getting caught. The essay reads: “Plagiarism is undisputedly, a most egregious academic offense. Unfortunately, I found that out the hard way. I cannot even begin to describe how unpleasant the experience was for me.”</p>

<p>On his Web page, Purrington notes that the essay is nicely written and urges instructors to hand it out to students to generate discussion. But he also notes with some chagrin: “That person got caught again some years later.”

[/quote]
</p>

<p><a href="http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2006/11/29/plagiarism%5B/url%5D"&gt;http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2006/11/29/plagiarism&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p>

8

<p>200 students in a graduate class with a computer based final? Hummmmmmm!</p>