Ethics? They are students at one of the world's most prestigious universities, pride themselves on their superior intellect and almost half of them admit they are cheaters. No, their behavior doesn't seem to bother them. Most feel guilt-free, they say. They rationalize their behavior by saying "everyone cheats." Sadly, it's getting harder and harder to deny that statement.
The most recent study to receive attention is out of the University of Cambridge (U.K.) where the student newspaper Varsity conducted an anonymous on-line poll of more than 1,000 students. They found that 49 per cent of undergraduates admitted to cheating, with only 5 per cent ever getting caught. Law students were at the top of the cheaters' list, with 62 per cent self-admitted cheaters.
"So what's up with law students?" asked Carolyn Elefant of Legal Blog Watch."Is it the training to rely on precedent -- which encourages us to cut and paste quotes and holdings from other cases -- what makes law students more prone to plagiarism? Are law students under more stress, and therefore, more tempted to cut corners and cheat? Or does our profession just encourage dishonest actors?"
TURNING A BLIND EYE TO PLAGIARISM
Academics in universities and colleges everywhere are being accused of turning a blind eye to the practice of plagiarism and other forms of cheating "to ensure their institutions climb national and international rankings," according to The Times (U.K.) which has called the cheating scandal "School Gate."
A BBC Newsreport quotes a Cambridge administrator saying that in spite of university policies "we acknowledge that plagiarism is a significant issue and an increasingly complex one in the new Internet era, for all universities to deal with."
Both students, faculty and administrators describe plagiarism as fairly institutionalized. Cheating students seem to have no fear of getting caught. In the Cambridge poll only 5 per cent of students said they had been caught and it didn't seem to make much of a difference, whether caught or not. The U.K.'s Higher Education Academy and Joint Information Systems Committee found in a report this year that even repeat offenders were unlikely to be "thrown off courses for cheating." Although almost all universities threaten expulsion as a sanction, only 143 students caught cheating were expelled out of 9,200 cases. The most common penalty was to have to re-submit work.
It's not surprising that 80 per cent of students said that the university IS doing enough to punish plagiarism, said the Varsity, the student newspaper that conducted the survey.
"You can see why students, a great number of whom are frequently breaking the rules to their own benefit, would be keen to uphold the impression that the system is working," said a member of the Cambridge General Board, the body responsible for education policy.
Interestingly, 82 per cent of plagiarists at Cambridge used Wikipedia for their essays, even though Wikipedia itself depends on external sources and can be modified anonymously by anyone. According to the university', the following are among its definitions of plagiarism :
- Handing in an essay written by someone else;
- Copying and pasting from the Internet;
- Copying or making up statistics, code or field-work;
- Handing in previously-submitted work;
- Using another's ideas without acknowledgment;
- Buying an essay.
As one Cambridge student told Varsity: "In one term I handed in 12 essays, nine of which were other peoples ...Even if I did get caught, I'm not convinced anything would happen."
Cambridge is now planning to introduce special plagiarism detection software to tackle the problem.
CHEATING = ACCEPTABLE STATUS QUO
It's every bit as much a problem in the U.S. as it is in Great Britain. Today, cheating is part of the acceptable status quo. A national study conducted by Donald McCabe of Rutgers, of 25,000 high school students from 2001 to 2008, found that more than 90 percent said they cheated, reported The New York Times.
"The challenge is daunting," writes Maura Casey. "Students of both genders and every demographic group cheat even though they know it is wrong, a mind-set Dr. (Jason) Stephens ( University of Connecticut) describes as "a corrosive force" -- especially when it is acquired in the early years of moral development. The fact that so many students cheat doesn't make them intrinsically bad, he says: "It's not a case of the bad seed. It's more like bad soil." Yet another study, out of Ohio State University - Newark found cheating students in the majority, with only 47 per cent saying they did not intend to cheat in the future. However, in this study researchers took a different approach to understand cheating by looking at why students choose NOT to cheat. They found that students who scored high on measures of courage, empathy and honesty were less likely to have cheated. This anonymous study was given to 132 men and 242 women. And, guess what? Females tended to score higher in all three -- courage, empathy and honesty. However, researchers said gender was not related to cheating. NOT CHEATING IS HEROIC TODAY Researcher Julie Hupp, said she was shocked that so many students believe it is alright to cheat and that so few students are being charged with academic misconduct. This is the same as found in the Cambridge study. "Students who don't cheat seem to be in the minority, and have plenty of opportunities to see their peers cheat and receive the rewards with little risk of punishment, " said researcher Sara Staats, as reported by Ohio State's student newspaper The Lantern. "We see avoiding cheating as a form of everyday heroism in an academic setting." THE PROFESSORS ARE CHEATING TOO How do you teach students ethics and moral choice when their professors, supposed role-models, are also cheating? Both students and professors can beat the system and so policing and the threat of punishment just isn't working. How about promoting integrity, teaching why it's important ? Researchers from the University of Australia found that academics plagiarize their own work in order to hold onto their jobs. In the "publish or perish" climate of academia, professors are reusing articles from a previous publication without citation. "Text-scanning machines, used to spot identical chunks of words, found that 60 per cent of scholars had recycled passages from their own work but failed to reference the fact," reports The Times (U.K.) Researchers found that out of 269 papers on the Web of Science (a database of social science and humanities journals), 161 included examples of self-plagiarism -- used from a previous publication without citation. This practice give academics an unfair advantage over more honest colleagues and undermines the pursuit of original knowledge. Researcher Travey Bretag said: "I think we ask more of our students than we do of ourselves. This issue underpins everything we do as academics. Are academics here to churn out paper after paper saying the same thing over and over again? Academic work is supposed to be original knowledge creation. But as long as you reward this behavior, it is very hard to change it." Developer of Turnitin, the plagiarism-detection software, John Barrie, has described self-plagiarism as a "huge" problem: "Academics receive tenure based on their publications -- it is publish or perish. That system creates this massive conflict of interest."
In an ABC Primtime report this past Spring, A Cheating Crisis in America's Schools, students said "the real world is terrible" and that they would "cheat to get by," describing cheating in school as a dress rehearsal for life. As evidence, the students mentioned President Clinton's Monica Lewinsky scandal and the country's financial scandals, along with inconsistencies of the court system.
Yes, it's getting harder and harder to deny the statement that "everybody's cheating." Certainly our academic institutions and its professors should step up and become role-models for integrity.
But then, why should they be different than the rest of the world? They're not getting paid as much as our financial cheaters, who get $100's of millions to resign after they're caught. When did virtue, morality and ethics become dirty words?
By Sharon McEachern
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