Cheating at school

'; ReadingText='With Cheating on the Rise, More Colleges Are Turning to Honor CodesBy Kate Zernike

With Cheating on the Rise, More Colleges Are Turning to Honor Codes
By Kate Zernike

Like most other college students, Eric Rogers knows that submitting a term paper taken off the Internet is outright plagiarism, cause for suspension or a failing grade.

What about using a paragraph?

"Just a paragraph?" he said. Beneath a Duke cap worn backward, he pondered. "A big paragraph or a small paragraph?"

"Taking a paragraph and changing words, I\'ve done that before; it wasn\'t a big deal," he decided finally. "As long as I can manipulate it to be my words, change a few, it\'s not cheating."

Under the honor code he signed when he entered Duke University last year, it is. But for many college students, the once-clear lines that define cheating have faded.

Some colleges and universities have resorted to sophisticated search engines to ferret out cheats. But an increasing number are turning to something decidedly more low-tech: their honor codes.

Given research that shows less cheating at colleges with strong honor codes than at those without them, some campuses are adopting codes for the first time. Others, among them Duke, acknowledging that their codes have existed mostly in name only, are rewriting and more aggressively enforcing them.

Cheating has become so common, experts say, that it often goes unreported and unpunished. The new honor codes aim to punish more while also forcing students and faculty members to think about the kinds of offenses that constitute cheating. At large universities and small liberal arts colleges alike, educators talk about restoring a "culture of honor."

"It\'s a psychological effect: if people expect you to be honorable, you are more likely to respond with honorable behavior," said Nannerl O. Keohane, the president of Duke. "We have to build a culture where people are genuinely offended by cheating."

A few miles away in Chapel Hill, a task force has recommended that the University of North Carolina strengthen its honor code by publishing a kind of police blotter of cheating incidents \u2014 no names \u2014 in the daily campus newspaper, lowering the standard of proof for cheating and adopting a grade of XF to mark failure due to cheating.

Surveys show not only that there is more cheating these days but also that students and teachers alike have become more accepting of some practices once considered out of bounds.

One such survey was performed for the Center for Academic Integrity, an organization based at Duke that helps create honor codes and that had only a handful of member universities when it was founded 10 years ago but now counts 250. In that survey, 27 percent of students questioned during the 2001-2 academic year said that falsifying laboratory data happened "often or very often" on campus. Forty-one percent said the same for plagiarism on written assignments, 30 percent for cheating during tests or exams, and 60 percent for collaborating on work when a professor has instructed students to work alone.

Moreover, 55 percent of the students said it was not serious cheating to get questions and answers from a student who had previously taken a test, and 45 percent said falsifying lab or research data did not fall into that category either.

An increase in cheating was clear from the response to some questions that had been asked two years earlier as well. From the 1999-2000 academic year to 2001-2, the number of college students who said they had cut and pasted from the Internet without attribution rose to 41 percent, from 10 percent.

Even more distressing, some experts say, is that the study also showed a dulled sense of academic integrity \u2014 what it is, or whether it matters. Students who thought cutting and pasting was "serious cheating" declined to 27 percent from 68 percent in those two years, and those who said it was serious to collaborate when a professor had instructed students to work on their own dropped to 12 percent from 24 percent.

A changing outlook was evident among teachers, too. Those who said cutting and pasting from the Internet was serious cheating dipped to 51 percent from 91 percent.

"The challenge for educators is we need to come to some agreement on what the rules are, because students are not accepting the rules that have been out there for years," said Donald McCabe, a professor of management at Rutgers University, who directed the study.

Whether the new honor codes will work remains an open question, of course. Some faculty members here and elsewhere wonder whether an honor code is not just a primitive tool but a na\u00EFve one.

But several studies since the 1960\'s have shown that schools without honor codes tend to have about twice as much cheating as those with them.

"The feeling of being treated as an adult and responding in kind," Professor McCabe said, "it\'s clearly there for many students. They don\'t want to violate that trust."

An honor code was introduced at Duke in 1993. Students signed the code, but it had little meaning for them.

"You didn\'t have a choice to sign it, you just did it," Nate Jenkins, a junior, said. "Who\'s going to say, `I will not follow the honor code\'?"

It was a survey in 2000 that jolted administrators into an effort to strengthen the code. In it, 45 percent of Duke students said they had engaged in unauthorized collaboration more than once, and 37 percent said they had faked lab data.

Some faculty members say students do not realize they are cheating, or at least do not realize they are engaged in serious offenses. Kacie Wallace, who oversees honor code violations for the dean of students, says the most common excuse is "I didn\'t mean to."

"That often translates into `I didn\'t mean to get in trouble,\' not `I didn\'t mean to plagiarize,\' " she said.

Administrators say that under the new "community standard" allowing faculty members to discipline first-time offenders on their own instead of referring them to a disciplinary council, students are more likely to learn that cheating is wrong, because teachers are more likely to take action.

Until now, the administrators say, faculty members were reluctant to turn students in for cheating, because the standard punishment was so severe: not only a failing grade but also a two-semester suspension. By contrast, a teacher\'s discipline for a first-time offender under the new policy could be simply a stern admonition. First-time offenders will nonetheless be reported to the dean, however, and a second offense will be referred to the disciplinary board, which will consider a range of punishment beginning with academic probation.

The new code will also be discussed in freshman seminars, and students and faculty members will be given handbooks outlining what constitutes cheating and how to deal with it. The dean of faculty also sent letters to professors reminding them to open the semester with a discussion of cheating.

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