Confronting Cheating: A Legal Primer and Tool Kit

Cheating strikes at the core of your school’s integrity. It creates an unethical environment among your students, and ultimately diminishes the quality and reputation of your institution.

Cheating isn’t new, but it seems to be more pervasive than ever. What’s fueling the cheating epidemic on college campuses? Quite a few things actually, including:

• Technology is making cheating easier than ever before. New electronic tools and techniques have made cheating too convenient for students and too difficult for faculty to monitor.
• Some students are more interested in a diploma than an education. For many students, the pursuit of knowledge has taken a back seat to the pursuit of a big salary. A diploma is the ticket to a high-paying job, and many will take the easiest route to get it.
• Legal issues are causing confusion and inaction. Administrators are wary of a legal misstep whenever a case of cheating arises. Is prosecuting a cheating case worth a lawsuit in return? If you’re not prepared, your school faces that possibility.

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Learn how to inoculate your college or university against the cheating epidemic in the Magna White Paper, Confronting Cheating: A Legal Primer and Tool Kit. The white paper authored by two experts in the field of academic cheating, will cut through the legalese and give you practical advice on:

• Creating a culture of academic integrity students will experience the moment they step foot on your campus.
• Protecting yourself from defamation and invasion of privacy charges that result from commonly-used confrontation methods.
• Combating the social norm that condones cheating by using five proven techniques in your classroom.
• Learning the best ways to handle grading and course completion while an investigation is underway.
• Eliminating confusion among your faculty and students by developing a cohesive package for academic integrity issues.

This newly released white paper will help you learn how to provide a unified front to combat cheating on campus. You’ll discover how to:

• Minimize your legal exposure.
• Develop an honor code for your campus.
• Analyze your current policies for consistency and thoroughness.
• Create tutorials for staff and students that clearly explain what constitutes cheating.
• Train your faculty and TAs on how to handle cheating in the classroom in order to avoid defamation charges by students.
• Build an understanding of the level of evidence that will be required in a hearing.
• Develop due process guidelines.

Cost

You can download the PDF of this white paper, or get the print version mailed to you.

A Campus Access License is available for an additional $200. It allows the purchasing institution to load the white paper onto the institution’s password-protected internal web site for unlimited access by members of the campus community.

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Organizational approaches to student cheating form a continuum from highly decentralized to highly centralized, and most schools fall somewhere on this spectrum.

The more decentralized a school’s response to cheating is, the more haphazard and, most likely, the more unfair, opaque, and inconsistent it is. For example, on campuses with highly decentralized responses, faculty members handle cheating as they see fit. Colleges and universities with somewhat decentralized responses might require faculty to report cheating to an academic chair, who then handles it within the department. At schools that fall somewhere in the middle, faculty might report cheating to a divisional dean, such as a psychology professor, who would report it to a social science dean. A centralized response to cheating would have faculty reporting directly to a provost. On highly centralized campuses, cheating would be reported to an academic integrity office.

Rule Compliance or Integrity: Examining the Two Approaches
The two dominant approaches to maintaining academic integrity on campus tend to be one of two centralized approaches. The rule compliance approach tells students what they can’t do, while the integrity approach offers guidelines for students on what they should do. The two approaches differ fundamentally in goal, method, and tone.

However, both approaches attribute the cause of the problem to the character of the individual student, who is assumed to be dysfunctional or acting in dysfunctional ways. The vernacular is morally laden and generally characterizes the student and his or her conduct as honest or dishonest, honorable or dishonorable, moral or immoral, good or bad, etc. This is true regardless of whether the cheating incident was the result of ignorance or malice.

Correspondingly, both strategies focus on resolving the problem primarily by either ridding the institution of the student, which is common in the compliance approach, or “fixing” the student, which is common in the integrity approach.

The rule compliance approach has a disciplinary, as opposed to a developmental, focus. In other words, it tries to increase the cost of misconduct.

The goal of this approach is to create a campus where students comply with the rules. The primary method used is discipline, and the tone is usually very legalistic and adversarial. There is heavy administrative involvement, which may include judicial affairs officers, student affairs professionals, and legal professionals or pre-professionals.

Alternately, the goal in the integrity approach is to create a campus where students choose to act with integrity. That is, they desire and choose to act ethically; they do not feel forced because of the possibility of discipline. Campuses that use the integrity strategy maintain that colleges are responsible for students’ ethical development; these schools use cheating as an opportunity for teaching.

The integrity approach is primarily developmental and uses discipline only as a tool. That is, discipline is used if it will help the student develop as a person and not merely to punish. The tone is generally more about forgiveness and second chances. Schools using the integrity approach rely heavily on faculty and student involvement; there is little administrative involvement. There is also significant corresponding campus talk about academic integrity and ethics. This includes any event or activity as part of a broader university initiative that brings awareness to ethics and integrity.

An example of the integrity approach can be found in part of the approach taken by the University of California San Diego (the approach at UCSD tends to be an amalgamation of rule compliance and integrity). The integrity approach is reflected in the requirement that all first-year students take an online academic integrity tutorial that aims to teach students about campus ethical standards. Academic integrity peer educators, both undergraduate and graduate students, engage in educational campaigns throughout the year in order to further reinforce the academic integrity message. And when students violate academic integrity standards, they are enrolled in an academic integrity seminar to further instill the core message that cheating, even in the smallest of acts, undermines the core purposes of the university and their own purposes for attending. This seminar also helps students learn from failure.

Reference:
Bertram Gallant, T. (2008). Academic Integrity in the Twenty-First Century: A Teaching and Learning Imperative. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.

Excepted from Building a Culture of Academic Integrity. Learn more about this white paper »

The numbers are alarming and do require a serious response, but have you ever turned the numbers upside down? For example, if 42 percent of college students admit to working with others on individual assignments, that means 58 percent aren’t getting help from others and those students would like you to do something about the 42 percent. If 38 percent admit to plagiarizing, that means 62 percent aren’t plagiarizing and those students expect you to do something about the 38 percent.

It’s an interesting view presented by Tricia Bertram Gallant, PhD, academic integrity coordinator at the University of California, San Diego, during the recent online seminar Teaching Integrity: Effective Responses to Cheating. The seminar challenged participants to dispel some of the myths around student cheating and rethink their role in establishing a culture of integrity.

“The common theme for today and for all my writing really is about encouraging students, teachers and administrators to not focus on policing, preventing and punishing cheating, which is by far the most typical response, but focus more on the more realistic picture of student cheating, the positive responses of infusing academic integrity back into our daily conversations in the classroom and in our responses to cheating.”

Promoting Academic Integrity
During the seminar, Bertram Gallant shared the following do’s and don’ts for promoting academic integrity in the college classroom.
Do

• Be clear about your expectations and rules for completing every assignment and test.
• Model integrity by citing your sources, showing up on time and prepared, and changing your exams and assignments from year to year.
• Limit temptations for cheating during your examinations.
• Work with your school’s policy and processes to reduce cheating.
• Rethink your out-of-class assignments – are they really measuring what you think they are?
• See academic and professional integrity as part of your teaching job – it may be one of the most important things you teach!

Don’t

• Assume the students know which behaviors are cheating and which are not.
• Tell students “don’t cheat or else” and expect that to work.
• Allow students to keep their exams and then wonder why your exams are “out there.”
• Confuse sloppy authorship with plagiarism – not all missed citations are an attempt to deceive.
• Expect students to learn from their mistakes unless someone is facilitating that learning.

“Just like every student has a different learning style, they have different ways in which they respond to different approaches to prevent cheating,” said Bertram Gallant. “At the Center for Academic Integrity we encourage faculty to focus on academic integrity standards and our five fundamental values of honesty, respect, responsibility, fairness and trustworthiness rather than on compliance and control.”

Faculty should be vigilant about preventing cheating and dealing with cases of academic dishonesty when they occur. But you know, I almost never hear faculty talking about what they are doing to promote academic integrity and for many years now, I’ve wondered if efforts to prevent cheating might not be more successful if we worked equally hard promoting academic integrity.

I don’t think most students understand the role academic integrity plays in the discovery and advancement of knowledge within the academy. For example, the reference at the end of the post reports findings from an interview study in which students responded to queries about plagiarism. Every student interviewed knew it was wrong, but most of them described it as something teachers didn’t want them to do, as if it were some peculiar problem teachers had copying the ideas of others. Even more indicated that they didn’t know how to avoid doing it.

How do we promote academic integrity? I think we start by explaining why it is so important at the individual level. Learning to be honest with yourself is part of becoming a mature person. Cheating may seem harmless at the moment—so what, if you don’t know the fact you need to answer an exam question and get it from someone else? Maybe that fact won’t need to be known in the future, but pretending it’s known when it isn’t easily leads to self-delusion. Academic dishonest hurts the cheater much more than it hurts anybody else. Students also need to understand the role of academic integrity in the discovery of knowledge. It is how facts become verified. It becomes the foundation on which knowledge rests and new knowledge is built. In every discipline there are examples of professionals who were honest about their results even when those findings were deeply disappointing and examples of those who reported false findings, were found out and suffered severe consequences.

Second, I think teachers need to model academic integrity in very explicit ways. We need to religiously name our sources—whose idea was this originally? What’s the source of this statistic? Who first proposed this theory? Most of us faithfully cite sources in published material that will be read by our peers. We should do the same in our classrooms. If a student proposes an idea that we refer to later in the course or another course, we ought to acknowledge that student. I once observed a great example of that … “I’m going to put up on the board a unique solution to this problem,” the instructor announced, “but before I do I want to let you know that it was proposed by Joe Bentley. He took this course fall semester,1994. It’s a great way to solve this problem.”

I am not naïve enough to imagine that by promoting academic integrity we can stop our efforts to prevent cheating. In the research students list all sorts of “good” reasons why they cheat: to keep their scholarships, to retain their athletic eligibility, to maintain their GPA, to get into selective professional programs, or to get the best job interviews. These reasons are not going to go away. But I retain a strong belief that students are reasonable human beings, and that many of them do care about what they do to themselves and others. Perhaps we can turn the tide, even just a bit by calling them to a higher standard.

If you promote academic integrity in your classes, please share your techniques in the comment box below.

Reference: Power, L. G. (2009). University students perceptions of plagiarism. Journal of Higher Education, 80 (6), 643-662.

Building a Culture of Academic Integrity

As much as we all hate to admit it, cheating goes hand-in-hand with the stressful, competitive environment of higher ed. It could be the loafer looking for an easy grade or the hardworking student who “has to get an A.” It happens on every campus, and it certainly isn’t a new problem.

Instead of working to eliminate cheating, colleges and universities can instead focus their efforts on building cultures of integrity. These campus environments organically discourage academic dishonesty and allow schools to harness the learning opportunities in cheating incidents.

You can learn how to lead an integrity movement on your campus by following the advice presented in Building a Culture of Academic Integrity. This white paper provides a step-by-step guide to building a culture of integrity and offers strategies to more fully incorporate values and ethics education into curriculum.

The white paper is based on an online seminar presented by Tricia Bertram Gallant, PhD., academic integrity coordinator at the University of California, San Diego and the current chair for the Center for Academic Integrity’s Advisory Council. Dr. Bertram Gallant has vast experience in generating campus interest in integrity and ethics, and has worked with students, faculty, and administrators to promote values and ethics education — from policy to practice.

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In Building a Culture of Academic Integrity Bertram Gallant helps you reframe your attitude toward cheating so that you—and your school—can view it as an opportunity for education and organizational change and not as a sign of failure. Specifically, you will learn to:

• Conduct a self-assessment of ethical learning opportunities on campus;
• Analyze and articulate your school’s approach to student cheating;
• Craft strategies for sustaining, enhancing, or changing your organization’s approach to academic dishonesty;
• Recognize opportunities for helping students learn from ethical failures, such as cheating and plagiarism;
• Identify campus colleagues who should be involved in an academic integrity initiative;
• Leverage student cheating as a stimulus for campus-wide prioritization of ethics and integrity; and
• Build a coalition of those stakeholders who have an interest in enhancing ethics and integrity on campus.

Ethical failures in higher education continue to make headlines, and the Internet and other technology make it easier and easier for students to plagiarize or to access information aids inappropriately. This newly issued, 40-page white paper will give professors and administrators real tools and strategies—not simply punishments—that can effectively change student behavior and develop academic and professional ethics.

Cost

You can download the PDF of this white paper, or get the print version mailed to you.

A Campus Access License is available for an additional $200. It allows the purchasing institution to load the white paper onto the institution’s password-protected internal web site for unlimited access by members of the campus community.

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The bottom line is that students cheat. That won’t change. But you can turn it into a learning opportunity with the right attitude and approach. Find out how to develop a campus culture of integrity in this solution-filled Magna Publications White Paper today.

Errol Craig Sull has taught online courses for more than 10 years and during that time has seen his share of copy and paste and essay-for-hire plagiarism. In some cases, the students don’t even realize they’re doing anything wrong or were never taught proper citation practices.

During the online seminar How to Detect and Prevent Plagiarism in the Online Classroom, Sull shared tips for spotting instances of plagiarism as well as how to minimize it from happening in the first place.

“The first thing you need to do is get students’ attention,” said Sull. “Let them know you are going to actively work to detect plagiarism and that there are software tools like Turnitin that you’ll be using.”
In addition to talking with your students about plagiarism, and teaching them how to correctly cite their sources, the ways in which you structure your assignments can go a long way in preventing plagiarism, Sull said.

Here are some of the plagiarism prevention strategies Sull uses in his courses:
Get to know your students. Early on in the course, low-stakes assignments that ask students to introduce themselves or discuss their goals for the course help provide a baseline if you need to compare a suspect essay against their writing style and stated interests.

Require up-to-date research. Paper mills often use older sources or don’t pay attention to the dates. Make it harder for students to buy their papers by requiring that all sources be no more than five years old.

Require revisions. Writing is a process and by making students submit an outline and drafts of a paper, you’re creating another barrier to plagiarism.

Require a journal. If students know they will need to discuss their research, how they arrived at their topic and thesis statement, and the problems they encountered, they will be less likely to submit unoriginal work, Sull said.

Vary the audience. Require students to write papers for different audiences and to use specific vocabulary, structural approach and research components in each paper.

“Remember: A teacher has always been a mixture of Socrates, Helen Keller, Confucius, Horace Mann, Galileo, Booker T. Washington, and Ayn Rand … but now must also add Sherlock Holmes, Indiana Jones, and Wyatt Earp,” Sull said.

Teaching Integrity: Effective Responses to Cheating

It could be a paper downloaded from the Web, roving eyes during an exam or the fifth student to lose a grandparent in one week … Whether you teach at a public or private institution, you’re bound to run into academic dishonesty sooner or later. So how can we respond to it effectively, or even prevent it in the first place?

Learn a proactive approach to dealing with cheating in Teaching Integrity: Effective Responses to Cheating. During this seminar Dr. Tricia Bertram Gallant, academic integrity coordinator at the University of California, San Diego, will review the common myths and misunderstandings about student cheating that limit your ability to respond effectively to the problem, and teach you a way forward based on teaching.

You’ll learn how to stop ignoring cheating, due to concerns about policing and bureaucratic entanglements, and start focusing on your critical role teaching tomorrow’s professionals about integrity and ethics.

View a brief clip from the seminar:

Teaching Integrity: Effective Responses to Cheating will help you change your perspective and practice to promote student integrity, and show you how a positive approach can prevent negative consequences.

You’ll learn different ways to think about cheating, such as:

• Switching from a “crime and punishment” approach to emphasizing teaching and learning
• Examining your teaching to see if it encourages or facilitates cheating
• Identifying your typical response to cheating.

You’ll come away with techniques you can implement right away, including:

• New teaching strategies to encourage academic integrity and reduce cheating
• New responses to cheating designed to create opportunities for student learning
• Behavior you can model to demonstrate academic integrity in action.

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An Active Approach to Teaching Academic Integrity
Bertram Gallant favors an energetic, conversational style in her presentations and there will be plenty of opportunities for you to get actively involved in this audio online seminar. The 90 minutes of this session will be divided evenly between lecture, learning activities and a Q&A session.

The seminar also includes supplemental materials, such as questions for self-assessment, do’s and don’ts and blank versions of worksheets you can adapt to your situation and begin building a culture of academic integrity right away.

Is This Seminar For You?
Problems with cheating extend across all disciplines and onto all college and university campuses, whether public or private. People in the following positions will find this seminar particularly helpful:

• Lecturer
• Adjunct Faculty
• Assistant Professor
• Associate Professor
• Professor

When you order the recording of this seminar on CD, you’ll also receive a PDF of the transcript, all for the same price as attending the seminar live.

An optional Campus Access License is available for an additional $200. It allows the purchasing institution to upload the CD of the seminar onto the institution’s password-protected internal web site for unlimited access by members of the campus community.

Order the CD + transcript package

All seminars include a discussion guide for facilitators
Participating in a Magna Online Seminar as a team can help leverage unique insights, foster collaboration, and build momentum for change. Each seminar now includes a Discussion Guide for Facilitators which provides step-by-step instructions for generating productive discussions and thoughtful reflection. You’ll also get guidelines for continuing the conversation after the event, implementing the strategies discussed, and creating a feedback loop for sharing best practices and challenges.

Conducted by the plagiarism detection company Turnitin, the study examined which Internet sites students rely on for unoriginal content in their written work by classifying 110 million content matches in 40 million student papers that were submitted to Turnitin over a 10-month period (June 2010 to March 2011).

It’s important to note that Turnitin detects that the content matches existing material in the company’s index of more than 14 billion pages of website content. A student’s paper could be flagged as having matching content, but also include the proper citations and therefore shouldn’t be considered plagiarism. It’s up to instructors to determine whether plagiarism occurred.

“Students are being raised in a digital culture where sharing, re-using and copying is routine,” says Chris Harrick, vice president of marketing at Turnitin. “Educators face a challenge in educating students that originality matters when it comes to critical thinking and writing.”

The study’s findings include:

• Plagiarism is going social. One-third of all content matched in the study is from social networks, content sharing or question-and-answer sites where users contribute and share content.
• Legitimate educational sites are more popular than cheat sites. One-quarter of all matched material is from legitimate educational web sites, almost double the number that comes from paper mills or cheat sites.
• 15 percent of content matches come directly from sites that promote and benefit from academic dishonesty. Paper mills and cheat sites are the third most popular category for matched content.
• Wikipedia is the most popular site for matched content. Wikipedia remains the most popular single source for student-matched content on the Web, comprising seven percent of matches in the months examined. The other most popular sites, in order, are answers.yahoo.com, www.answers.com, www.slideshare.net, www.oppapers.com, www.scribd.com, www.coursehero.com, www.medlibrary.org.

The full study, titled “Plagiarism: Myths and Realities,” can be downloaded at http://pages.turnitin.com/PlagiarismandtheWebSEC.html. Registration is required.

How to Detect and Prevent Plagiarism in the Online Classroom

Plagiarism has always been a thorn in the side of academia. But with more resources online … just a click, copy and paste away … the need for new strategies that prevent and detect plagiarism has never been greater.

Why has plagiarism become such a problem among today’s college students? Consider the current environment:

• The Internet makes information easily accessible.
• A tight employment market puts more pressure on students to achieve high grades.
• The increasing number of online courses increases the number of students who will make use of the Internet to cheat.
• The tie-in between good grades and financial aid eligibility may compel a student to act irresponsibly.

The audio online seminar How to Detect and Prevent Plagiarism in the Online Classroom, explains critical strategies to not only detect plagiarism, but also minimize the likelihood of it becoming a problem in your classroom.

In the online audio seminar, you’ll learn key methods for fighting online plagiarism, including:

• How to minimize plagiarism in the online classroom
• Factors behind student plagiarism
• Two forms of online plagiarism
• What to do about plagiarism once it occurs

Today’s new digital environment means online plagiarism will only grow more prevalent. This seminar shows you how to focus on preventative measures to provide a better learning experience for your students.

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Who will benefit:
Anyone who teaches or manages online courses will benefit from this program. This includes professionals at community colleges, and public and private colleges and universities offering undergraduate, graduate and post-graduate courses.

It will particularly appeal to staff and faculty in these key positions:

• Online instructors
• Online teaching supervisors
• Institution presidents
• Deans
• Education directors
• Human Resources personnel

When you order the recording of this seminar on CD, you’ll also receive a PDF of the transcript, all for the same price as attending the seminar live.

An optional Campus Access License is available for an additional $200. It allows the purchasing institution to upload the CD of the seminar onto the institution’s password-protected internal web site for unlimited access by members of the campus community.

Order the CD/transcript

Includes a Discussion Guide for Facilitators.
Participating in a Magna Online Seminar as a team can help leverage unique insights, foster collaboration, and build momentum for change. Each seminar now includes a Discussion Guide for Facilitators which provides step-by-step instructions for generating productive discussions and thoughtful reflection. You’ll also get guidelines for continuing the conversation after the event, implementing the strategies discussed, and creating a feedback loop for sharing best practices and challenges.

A. Say “Mr. Smith, keep your eyes on your own paper.”
B. Walk up to Mr. Smith and ask him to turn in his exam to you.
C. Walk over and see approximately where he is on the exam and then ask several students to exchange seats.
D. Ignore it. Confronting cheating is not worth the hassle.

“Here’s what you need to remember when you’re confronting cheating in the classroom – do not take the exam away,” said Debi Moon, assistant vice president of educational affairs at Georgia Perimeter College. “Now if they’re using a cheat sheet, you can discreetly take the cheat sheet … but you need to let them complete the exam. For one thing, you don’t know for sure they’re cheating, and by taking their exam you’ve gotten yourself into a pot full of trouble”

The correct answer to the above scenario is C. This allows you to avoid embarrassing the student with public accusations, which could lead to defamation charges, while still giving you the opportunity to confront the cheating in a private meeting with the student. It’s also important to note that, as tempting as it is to use exam time to catch up on grading or other tasks, instructors can do a lot to deter cheating simply by walking around and being visible in the classroom, Moon said.

In the recent online video seminar, Cheating: A Legal Primer Toolkit for Faculty & Administrators, Moon and Rob Jenkins, associate professor of English at Georgia Perimeter College, shared strategies for creating a culture of academic integrity, as well as effective ways to handle cheating once it occurs. The key, Jenkins said, is to “make academic integrity visible to students – something that is a tangible part of your campus.”

Here are five ways to go visible and beat cheating, as recommended by Moon and Jenkins:

1. Honor Code: Develop an honor code that fits your institution and makes it socially unacceptable to cheat. The Center of Academic Integrity has a number of resources for creating or updating your honor code.
2. Orientations: As part of the orientation process for new students, some schools are beginning to ask other students to talk about the importance of academic integrity, and the consequences of cheating in college. Another interesting idea comes from The University of Notre Dame, which requires all new undergraduates to pass an online honor code orientation prior to finalizing their class registration.
3. Tutorials: In some cases, students don’t have a firm grasp of what constitutes cheating and plagiarism. To eliminate any gray areas, a tutorial can provide clear definitions and specific examples of what’s acceptable and what’s not.
4. PR Campaign: A lot of schools have honor codes (or in some cases multiple versions of an honor code) tucked away in a student handbook or faculty handbook. PR is about making your honor code visible and that includes communicating your values in those common venues such as handbooks, as well as through posters in classrooms, residential halls and the library, and on blue books. Holding contests that ask students to create a video on academic integrity is another way of getting students actively involved.
5. Classroom Strategies: The final strategy for making academic integrity a visible part of your campus culture is by what you do in the classroom. This includes having a statement about academic integrity in your syllabus and talking about cheating during the first class of the semester. Developing cheat resistant assignments will help minimize cheating as well.

“I think as faculty members sometimes we’re afraid that if we talk about cheating too much [and list examples of cheating] that a student will say ‘Oh, I never thought of that,’” said Jenkins. “I really don’t think that’s a realistic fear. You’re not telling them anything they don’t know. They know these things are out there, but what they might not know if there’s anything wrong with them.”

Cheating: A Legal Primer Toolkit for Faculty & Administrators

Cheating appears to be everywhere, and stemming the tide is no easy task. Students have easy access to cheating technologies, while confusing policies and legal issues make enforcement difficult for both faculty and administration.

Cheating strikes at the core of your school’s integrity. It creates an unethical environment among your students, and ultimately diminishes the quality and reputation of your institution.

What’s fueling the epidemic? Why do you need to take action sooner than later?

• Technology is making cheating easier than ever before. New electronic tools and techniques have made cheating too convenient for students and too difficult for faculty to monitor.
• Some students are more interested in a diploma than an education. For many students, the pursuit of knowledge has taken a back seat to the pursuit of a big salary. A diploma is the ticket to a high-paying job, and many will take the easiest route to get it.
• Legal issues are causing confusion and inaction. Administrators are wary of a legal misstep whenever a case of cheating arises. Is prosecuting a cheating case worth a lawsuit in return? If you’re not prepared, your school faces that possibility.

Here’s a brief clip from the seminar:

It’s time to inoculate your college or university against the cheating epidemic by attending Cheating: A Legal Primer Toolkit for Faculty and Administrators. The video online seminar, conducted by two experts in the field of academic integrity, cuts through the legalese and give you practical advice on:

• Creating a culture of academic integrity students will experience the moment they step foot on your campus.
• Protecting yourself from defamation and invasion of privacy charges that result from commonly-used confrontation methods.
• Combating the social norm that condones cheating by using five proven techniques in your classroom.
• Learning the best ways to handle grading and course completion while an investigation is underway.
• Eliminating confusion among your faculty and students by developing a cohesive package for academic integrity issues.

Order this Seminar

The video online seminar will help you learn how to provide a unified front to combat cheating on campus. You’ll discover how to:

• Minimize your legal exposure.
• Develop an honor code for your campus.
• Analyze your current policies for consistency and thoroughness.
• Create tutorials for staff and students that clearly explain what constitutes cheating.
• Train your faculty and TAs on how to handle cheating in the classroom in order to avoid defamation charges by students.
• Build an understanding of the level of evidence that will be required in a hearing.
• Develop due process guidelines.

By the end of the seminar, both faculty and administrators will have developed a simple, cohesive legal strategy that not only encourages academic integrity, but also makes it clear how to handle cheating if it occurs.

Who will benefit
Any educator from a two- or four-year college or university who is interested in creating a culture of academic integrity should attend. Recommended positions include:

• Faculty
• Department chairs
• Deans
• Academic and student affairs personnel

Order this Seminar

New for 2011! A Discussion Guide for Facilitators.

Participating in a Magna Online Seminar as a team can help leverage unique insights, foster collaboration, and build momentum for change. Each seminar now includes a Discussion Guide for Facilitators which provides step-by-step instructions for generating productive discussions and thoughtful reflection. You’ll also get guidelines for continuing the conversation after the event, implementing the strategies discussed, and creating a feedback loop for sharing best practices and challenges.

He’s been doing this for years, but says he has yet to find comfort in the cheating countermeasures colleges and universities have taken to ensure academic integrity on their campuses. In fact, he says, in an effort to try to minimize problems with cheating some institutions have gone so far as to reduce the number of exams and graded assignments.

Cheating has become a topic of great concern for educators, and for good reason. Survey after survey finds cheating is on the rise, becoming not only more pervasive but more sophisticated as well. From the low-tech old standbys of writing formulas on a tiny piece of paper or peeking at the answers of the person sitting next to them, to high-tech solutions like replacing the song names on their iPod with notes or test answers, the trends are disturbing.

In the recent online seminar The New (and Old) Ways Students Cheat: What You Can Do About It, Howell, director of the BYU Salt Lake Center, provided a breathtaking list of examples of the ways students are cheating. These included writing notes to the inside of a hat brim, on stick of gum which can then be eaten, on a water bottle label, or even on a heavily tattooed arm. Meanwhile high-tech devices like graphing calculators, DocuPens and cell phones allow students to store and share test answers in just a few clicks.

“I’ve been in education for 20 years and I was unaware how pervasive the problem is,” says Howell, who’s been studying academic integrity for a few years now. “Each of us has to do a better job than we have done.”

The ways that students cheat are just as varied as the reasons why they cheat. Some of the justifications students provide for cheating, whether it’s cheating on an exam or plagiarizing a paper, include: everyone else is doing it, they won’t get caught, a friend needed the answers, they have to pass the class, and the course is too hard.

While there is no single thing faculty can do to eliminate cheating, Howell recommends staying current on the latest cheating methods and communicating that fact to your students. He also suggests making the following changes to the testing environment:

• If space permits, arrange students so that there are empty chairs in between each student.
• Have assigned seating during tests, making sure to separate friends.
• Display signs at the test center entrance regarding use of cell phones.
• Have a policy that no personal belongings are permitted in the testing area and all such belongings will be confiscated.
• Ask students to keep hands in plain sight above the table top.
• Instruct students to keep their test papers close to their body and on the surface of the table during the test.
• Don’t sit in the front of the room. Walk around and monitor students frequently.
• Don’t allow more than one student to go to the restroom at a time. When a student leaves for the restroom, collect his test and hold it until he returns.

The New (and Old) Ways Students Cheat: What You Can Do About It

When it comes to academic cheating, students have come a long way from the days of writing on their palm or even taping cheat sheets to their water bottle. Technology makes it possible for students – especially those learning online – to cheat in a myriad of new ways. That’s “progress” of a very depressing sort.

In a recent survey, a stunning 95% of students admitted to cheating at some point in their academic career. In other words, basically everybody.

Distance learning only increases the opportunities to cheat. Confirming identities and restricting access to unauthorized resources are just two of the acute challenges distance educators face.

Learn the latest about how students cheat in the virtual classroom – and how you can prevent it.

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The New (and Old) Ways Students Cheat: What You Can Do About It features Scott Howell, PhD, director of Brigham Young University, Salt Lake Center. In this 75-minute audio presentation, Dr. Howell outlines the scope of the cheating problem today, the reasons it should be of concern, and strategies you can employ to stem the tide. He explains the pervasiveness of cheating at all education levels, and give an overview of the high-tech and low-tech methods of cheating, including:

• Phone and MP3 cheating
• Braindumps
• Organized group cheating
• The use of Bluetooth technology
• Traditional methods, from cheat sheets to body writing
• Online “how to cheat” tutorials
• And more

In addition, Dr. Howell discusses key accreditation and Department of Education issues that make it urgent to address cheating now, and explain some of the interventions being employed successfully at institutions nationwide, including:

• The honor system
• Banning electronic devices
• Requiring ID
• Fingerprinting and scanning
• Commercial security systems
• Cheat-resistant laptops
• Randomized testing
• Statistical analysis

Learn how you can help maintain academic integrity in today’s online classroom.

Who shouldbuy this seminar?
Cheating is an issue that concerns everyone. We recommend the seminar for a broad campus audience, including:

• VPs
• Directors
• Academic chairs
• Faculty
• Instructors
• Testing center personnel
• Proctors

Learn how an old problem is impacting the new online classroom …and what you can do about it.

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Promoting Academic Integrity in Online Education

Although there’s some disagreement as to whether distance education is more susceptible to academic dishonesty than other forms of instruction, what isn’t up for debate is the fact that for as long as there’s been exams, there’s been cheating on exams. The online environment simply opens up a different set of challenges that aren’t typically seen in traditional face-to-face courses.

If you teach online or manage the distance education program for your school, the issue of academic integrity is always top of mind. This free report features nine articles from Distance Education Report that will give you the latest techniques and technologies for mitigating cheating and other unethical behaviors in your online courses.

Promoting Academic Integrity in Online Education

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Ask most people who don’t teach online about the likelihood of academic dishonesty in an online class and you will likely hear concerns about the many ways that students could misrepresent themselves online.

Indeed, concerns about the lack of face-to-face faculty-student interactions have forced online education providers to continuously examine their programs and develop sophisticated approaches to ensure the integrity of their academic programs. As a result, some believe that distance education has done more to align pedagogy, assessments, and learning objectives than many traditional post-secondary programs.

You can read about many of them here in Promoting Academic Integrity in Online Education. The 20-page special report features these articles:

• Combating Online Dishonesty with Communities of Integrity
• The New News about Cheating for Distance Educators
• A Problem of Core Values: Academic Integrity in Distance Learning
• Student Authentication: What Are Your Duties Under the HEA Reauthorization?
• 91 Ways to Maintain Academic Integrity in Online Courses
• Remote Proctoring: Key to Secure Exam Administration?
• A Chink in Our Armor: Can Technology Provide a True Online Proctored Exam?
• Practical Tips for Preventing Cheating on Online Exams
• Identity Gift: The Opposite of Identity Theft?

Promoting Academic Integrity in Online Education

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Whether you’re a believer in the honor system, stringent policing or something along the “trust but verify” approach, this report is jam-packed with practical information you can use right away.

Join the Faculty Focus community for full access to all our special reports!

Faculty Focus contains a wealth of valuable material on all of the key issues that matter to today’s top faculty and administrators. It’s packed with strategies, tips, and other information you can use on the topics that impact your students, your school, and your work, including:

• Instructional Design
• Faculty Development
• Teaching Strategies
• Distance Learning
• Classroom Management
• Educational Assessment
• Faculty Evaluation
• Learning Styles
• Curriculum Development
• Trends in Higher Education
• And much, much more.

Promoting Academic Integrity in Online Education

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A connected world
According to research Kitahara has surveyed, up to 75 percent of students report engaging in some form of academic dishonesty. And it is clear that academe is not equipped to respond quickly to new threats, as students have proven remarkably able to change tactics.

“Part of our problem is, in our effort to make things more portable, we haven’t kept up. We need to put in security measures, [but we’re] behind the power curve,” Westfall says.

“It’s a losing battle; for everything we dream up, the students will get around it,” Kitahara adds.

Troy University is experimenting with tools like the Securexam Remote Proctor, a piece of hardware that connects to a computer’s USB port and records the exam as the student completes it. It also allows students to identify themselves by fingerprint at various points in the exam as stipulated by the instructor, so that another student is less likely to be able to step in to complete the exam.

The Remote Proctor may allow for better monitoring of students who are taking exams outside the classroom, but the need for such a device is the result of a cultural shift that has long-ranging implications beyond just cheating on a test or copying a few lines from Wikipedia.

“I don’t believe people will behave differently in one context than they do in another,” says Kitahara. Therefore, the student who today is cheating on a test may be the employee who tomorrow is fudging the accounting books. How many people involved in the Enron debacle committed academic dishonesty in school? How many loan officers who talked a financially marginal customer into a subprime mortgage in order to make quota were ones who thought copying from an encyclopedia was OK if they didn’t get caught?

The costs of academic dishonesty
One reason that students are able to commit academic dishonesty is that the punishments are far less onerous than the behavior they punish.

“The cost/benefit is in favor of the student,” says Kitahara. After all, it takes a great deal of investment from the university to police student behavior, verify academic dishonesty, and pursue punishment; for the student, the decision usually involves weighing the benefit of quick completion of an assignment with a better grade than could be earned alone against the by-no-means-certain threat of being caught and the likelihood of a slap on the wrist, such as failure of a single assignment or at most a single class.

For Kitahara, all of this points to the need for more stringent consequences to academic dishonesty. “A failing grade in one class isn’t going to do. It has to be something that everyone can see, like a permanent notation on the transcript,” he says. The notation would be something that would stay with the student, marking an episode of academic dishonesty for future graduate schools and employers to see, and it would remediate part of the problem of lack of student concern about cheating. “Too many students simply don’t care; all they have to do [now] is take the course over again,” he says.

However, Westfall and Kitahara agree that these measures are “just band aids,” as Kitahara puts it. Until students develop an internal sense of right and wrong that governs their behavior, we will continue to need Remote Proctors and ever more creative methods for making academic dishonesty more difficult.

Excerpted from A Problem of Core Values: Academic Integrity in Distance Learning, Distance Education Report, April 1, 2009.

How you respond to cheating, both at an individual and institutional level, can make a big difference. Throughout history, colleges and universities have taken one of two approaches to curb cheating, says Tricia Bertram Gallant, academic integrity coordinator at the University of California San Diego and chair of the Center for Academic Integrity Advisory Council.

Some take a “rule compliance” approach, which is a discipline-based strategy of creating a campus where students comply with the rules. It’s legalistic and adversarial in nature with heavy involvement from administration and legal professionals.

The second, more recent strategy is the “integrity” approach, which takes a developmental perspective to creating a campus where students choose to act with integrity. It’s demonstrated with greater level of student involvement and a highly visible culture of academic integrity.

In the recent online seminar Helping Students Learn from Ethical Failures, Gallant talked about these two common approaches to academic dishonesty, how to assess if it’s time to rethink your current policy, and what’s needed to create a culture of academic integrity. She also shared case studies on how four institutions have approached the integrity issue at their campuses, and provided strategies on overcoming resistance to policy change.

“The point is, and I want to emphasize this, there is no one-size-fits-all approach to student cheating,” Gallant says. “Each campus should adopt an approach that is the best match for their institutional structures and cultures, while also challenging the campus to do more when it comes to teaching students about the meaning of ethics and integrity.”

Building a culture of academic integrity is a four-stage process, Gallant says. Consider the following benchmarks as you work your way through the stages.

Stage 1: Recognition and commitment – Recognize cheating is a problem, admit your current way of handing it isn’t working, and commit to address it.

Stage 2: Response generation – Study with problem and gather data to assess campus climate, focusing on faculty and students. Have structured conversations and avoid quick fixes.

Stage 3: Implementation – Establish structures and processes for encouraging academic integrity. Once implemented, communication mechanisms are standard, consistent, and routine, and faculty know what to do in their classes.

Stage 4: Institutionalization – Integrity is fully integrated into campus life. Cheating is occasional and everyone knows how to respond.

In this, the second of a two-part email interview, the authors offer advice to academic leaders on how to create healthy environments that support ethical choices at all levels of the organization.

Faculty Focus: What types of policies and practices do you recommend colleges/universities have in place at the institutional level to promote a culture of academic integrity?

Authors: We recommend that colleges and universities focus on creating healthy ethical environments that support ethical choices at all levels of the organization, rather than simply focusing on stopping students from cheating. Does the campus prioritize ethics and integrity in its resource allocation and mission? Does the campus regularly assess its ethical climate? Does the campus have the structures and processes to support a focus on ethics?

To begin, we recommend the following:

1. Do not attempt a “one-size-fits-all” approach. Many campuses make the mistake of believing that the implementation of an honor code can solve the problem because they heard that honor codes work on other campuses. The principles behind an honor code can work (i.e., community commitment to upholding academic integrity, student involvement in the process) can be helpful, but the format they eventually take should evolve organically from within the specific organizational context. For example, an honor code would not fit with the culture at UC San Diego, but it might work at a small liberal arts, religious-affiliated college.
2. Do clearly articulate the values and expectations of the institution and put into place structures and processes that can help those values and expectations be realized. If you state that you value academic integrity, how do the students see that? Is there an academic integrity office or educational program?
3. Reduce legalism and enhance education. Too many of our campuses have taken a legalized approach to academic integrity and it is simply not necessary and interferes with our ability to make this a part of the educational experience. Take a look at your conduct code from the point of an undergraduate—would YOU be influenced by it to act differently?
4. Implement a socialization (not orientation) program to help students adapt to the university environment. Many of our students violate academic integrity principles by doing their college academic work in the same ways they completed their high school assignments. Help students make that adjustment.
5. Provide instructors with the support they need to prevent cheating and address it when they see it. Are instructors provided with sufficient proctors and room size for the size of their class? Is the process for reporting unnecessarily cumbersome and time-consuming? Are faculty subtly “punished” for addressing cheating through their loss of time and poor course evaluations? Does the faculty clearly know their professional obligation to confront cheaters using institutional policies? Are the procedures for doing so clear and not cumbersome?

In chapter 6 of our book we talk extensively about attending to the development of institutional and individual integrity, including ongoing and committed conversations about integrity and the difficulty (and importance) of enacting it in the 21st century.

Reference:
Davis, S., Drinan, P., & Gallant T. (2009). CHEATING IN SCHOOL: What We Know and What We Can Do. Wiley-Blackwell.

Author Bios:
Stephen F. Davis is Professor Emeritus at Emporia State University (Kansas), Distinguished Guest Professor at Morningside College (Iowa) and Visiting Distinguished Professor of Psychology at Texas Wesleyan University.

Patrick F. Drinan, Professor of Political Science at the University of San Diego, completed his Ph.D. in 1972 at the University of Virginia, and has served as the dean of the College of Arts and Sciences at the University of San Diego from 1989-2007.

Tricia Bertram Gallant is the Academic Integrity Coordinator at the University of California, San Diego, and is the current Chair for the Center for Academic Integrity’s Advisory Council.

Faculty Focus: What are some of the most common forms of cheating that occur in college?

Authors: Around half of the students surveyed admit to homework copying, plagiarism (copying and pasting another’s words or ideas without attribution), and exam cheating (whether copying or use of unauthorized aid) are the most common.

We still catch students who use old fashioned methods for exam cheating (like writing the answers on an arm for easy access during the test), but we suspect that many students are using digital aids that are likely more difficult to catch. Some of the more egregious acts that are thankfully less common (we think) include: submitting a paper written by someone else (paper mills are a booming business), arranging for an exam-proxy, stealing exams out of professors’ offices to distribute ahead of time, fabricating lab data, and altering incorrect answers on a graded exam and asking for a re-grade.

Faculty Focus: At the classroom level, what are some specific steps that college instructors can take to reduce cheating in their courses?

Authors: We cover this extensively in the book, but briefly, here are a few strategies instructors can implement to discourage cheating:

• Clearly articulate your expectations for the class and EACH INDIVIDUAL ASSIGNMENT. Can students work with others on their homework assignments, for example? Can they use old exams, lab reports, etc. as aids in the course?
• Explicitly link assignments to learning objectives. Students often cheat on assignments that they see as meaningless or “busy-work.” If they understand the point of the assignment, especially how it will help them learn the material, they are more likely to push through it on their own rather than copy from someone else.
• Reduce temptations to cheating. We cannot control student behavior, but we can at least show them that we care about the integrity of our classes by doing little things. For example, space students out during exams, provide multiple versions of the same test, require students to leave all non-essential materials at the front of the room, and have the WiFi turned off in the test room.
• Talk to students about the relation of academic integrity to professional ethics and their future chosen career. Students are more likely to uphold integrity in academic assignments if they see it as holding more value than just being “another institutional rule.”
• Report all cheating when you see it, rather than ignore it or handle it on your own. A professor can become known as someone who does not tolerate cheating or look the other way, and then the cheaters will not choose her class! Also, many professors mistakenly assume that they can reduce cheating on their own, but it takes the entire campus. If instructors do not report cheating, that same student may be cheating in other courses and no one would ever know!

(Editor’s note: In part two of this interview the authors will offer advice to academic leaders on creating healthy ethical environments that support ethical choices at all levels of the organization. Look for it in the Oct. 14 issue of Faculty Focus.)

Reference:
Davis, S., Drinan, P., & Gallant T. (2009). CHEATING IN SCHOOL: What We Know and What We Can Do. Wiley-Blackwell.

Author Bios:
Stephen F. Davis is Professor Emeritus at Emporia State University (Kansas), Distinguished Guest Professor at Morningside College (Iowa) and Visiting Distinguished Professor of Psychology at Texas Wesleyan University.

Patrick F. Drinan, Professor of Political Science at the University of San Diego, completed his Ph.D. in 1972 at the University of Virginia, and has served as the dean of the College of Arts and Sciences at the University of San Diego from 1989-2007.

Tricia Bertram Gallant is the Academic Integrity Coordinator at the University of California, San Diego, and is the current Chair for the Center for Academic Integrity’s Advisory Council.

Helping Students Learn from Ethical Failures

Students cheat. Even before graduating from high school, more than half have cheated on tests, and more than a third have plagiarized. (And those are the ones who admit it.) These days, it’s almost too easy to cheat. Stiff competition for admissions and the imperative of high grades give students powerful motive, while the Internet provides ubiquitous opportunity.

We’re never going to eliminate cheating. But we can create programs that educate students about honesty and character, reduce the incidence of cheating and turn ethical lapses into opportunities for growth and learning.

That’s the focus of this seminar featuring Dr. Tricia Bertram Gallant, academic integrity coordinator at the University of California San Diego and chair of the Center for Academic Integrity Advisory Council. If you’re concerned about academic integrity, and committed to championing it on your campus, you’ll want to get this seminar.

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• Conduct a self-assessment of ethical learning opportunities on your campus.
• Analyze your institution’s approach to student cheating.
• Overcome resistance to providing values/ethics education.
• Lead a campus-wide integrity movement.
• Build a coalition of stakeholders with an interest in enhancing academic integrity.
• Leverage cheating incidents to stimulate prioritization of ethics and integrity.

Learn how to help craft a thoughtful, positive and productive position on student ethics and academic integrity for your institution. Don’t miss this eye-opening seminar!

Who will benefit:

• Faculty
• Department chairs
• Deans
• Provosts
• Chancellors
• Presidents
• Student affairs

Cheating is an old problem, with new complications.
Learn about them–and about how you can be part of the solution.

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