Beer and Circus

by Murray Sperber

Quick, a test: You’re a freshman and you’re running late for Psych 101. You could drag yourself over to the lecture hall and strain to hear the tiny professorial speck down at the lectern impart wisdom. Or you could clock on www.StudentU.com and download the speck’s course notes … .

  Students who download notes are right. The notes are adding value to the assembly line of undergraduate education, where grad students and minor [faculty] lights, not earth-shattering geniuses, lecture, and where traded paper notes have long been the order of the day.

  A University of Texas (Austin) student columnist confirmed USA Today’s argument: “The unwritten UT philosophy,” exemplified by the mass lecture courses at the school and the arrogant faculty, is: “We [professors] are smart, you [undergraduates] are stupid. We lecture, you take notes.” Obviously, this system generates undergraduate cynicism, the purchase of lecture notes, and more serious forms of cheating.

  A dissident professor at the University of Virginia offered a sensible but biting solution to the lecture note controversy:

  Maybe the course should be distributed as a book, rather than having this charade of somebody standing up and going through a lecture that, for all purposes, doesn’t change from year to year and doesn’t allow students the possibility of discussion.

  Most academics who oppose course notes appearing on the web have considered the book option—for that reason, they generally cite copyright issues, not pedagogical ones, in opposing the web note-taking services. Indeed, many faculty members publish the book and require the hundreds of students in their lecture classes to buy it. The professor then makes a profit from these forced purchases and still lectures from the book! This prompts the question: Who is cheating in this situation?

  Anthony Scimone, a high school teacher, neatly summed up the debate about the new websites: “I suspect that the best teachers are not threatened by the new note-taking services. These teachers … encourage students to generate ideas and engage in scholarly discourse.” The current studies on why students cheat confirms Mr. Scimone’s intuition; one authority commented, “It’s clear that when students really care about learning, they’re much less likely to cheat.” An official at a large public university noted that “In the 100 and 200 level [lecture] classes you see much more cheating” than in small upper-level courses; in the latter, “students take greater pride in their work because it is more important to them,” and because they have direct contact with a professor.

  The most striking proof of how a low faculty/student ratio short-circuits cheating comes from a study of schools with honor codes—where students can cheat easily and constantly if they choose to do so. Because these institutions emphasize undergraduate education, have few lecture courses, and because the “honor codes [are] rooted in a campus tradition of mutual trust and respect … between faculty members and students,” they succeed in eliminating almost all student cheating.

  At Rice University, for example, professors hand out exams and allow students to return to their dorm rooms or apartments with the exams in order to use their computers there to write their answers. Faculty trust students to take the exam without seeking any outside aid, without even opening their course books or notes. According to a current Rice undergraduate, “I’ve never seen anyone or heard of anyone breaking the honor code. Anyway, you’d mainly be cheating yourself [out of a good education] … . Also you become friendly with your instructors, and so cheating on them is like stealing from someone you know.”

  Rice University and other schools with low faculty/student ratios try to provide their undergraduates with quality educations. But what occurs at large public universities with high ratios? A faculty member at the University of Central Florida, a school that recently moved to NCAA Division I-A, has research ambitions, and features many lecture classes, explained that “The increasing casualness with which students seem to be cheating and committing plagiarism is just another symptom of the paradigm shift … to education as a consumer product—something that must be handed over on demand to all who pay their tuition.” But the paradox reappears here: Why would students cheat if, after paying their bursar bills, they are simply handed what they want?

  One answer, suggested by P.S. notes on the questionnaire for this book, is that some undergraduates cheat as a primitive, inarticulate form of consumer protest: they feel that because their U cheats them out of their money by giving them worthless classes, their dishonesty is justified. “This place constantly screws me over and takes my money,” wrote a student at the University of New Mexico. “So why should I have a conscience about cheating in class?” Nevertheless, primitive individual actions—unlike the organized student protests in the 1960s—fail to disrupt the current system in any way; indeed, they deflect attention from its failures and allow college officials to place the blame for the cheating problem on “student immorality.”

  An Indiana University undergraduate offered his view of student dishonesty in a caustic article in the campus newspaper. He described “The Only Syllabus You’ll Ever Need” at this school, and his cynicism about the huge lecture courses and indifferent professors premised his approval of student deceit. Under “Cheating” on his mock syllabus, he noted:

  Students caught cheating will be dealt with swiftly and severely by the Dean of Students, although you have to be practically brain-dead to get caught cheating in a huge lecture class. There’s like, 300 kids in there—it’s easy.

  Under “Grades,” he wrote: “Your grade in this course will be determined by two fifty-minute tests,” no papers, no writing assignments.

  As this student noted, cheating during lecture course exams is not difficult: in addition to the time-worn methods of copying from the person next to you and using crib sheets, undergraduates now employ such hightech devices as cellular phones to dial multiple-choice answers into alphanumeric pagers, for example, 1C-2B-3A, to exchange answers with friends. One teacher remarked, “I get the sense there’s a thrill to it, that [students think] ‘my teachers are too dumb to catch me.’”

  Probably some undergraduates hold this belief; however, dumbness does not prevent most professors from catching student cheaters—deafness does. Faculty simply do not want to hear about it. Tolerating cheating is a hidden clause in the nonaggression pact between many faculty members at research universities and their students. A classics professor at Northwestern University explained: “Most professors at a place like Northwestern can’t be bothered [about undergraduate cheating]. They’re not rewarded for teaching; they’re rewarded for research. There’s no future in pursuing cheating from the standpoint of a professor’s self-interest.”

  As for students cheating for “the thrill of it”: undoubtedly some undergraduates do it for the risk-taking thrill, but others also regard cheating as an active, engaging experience, far superior to passively ingesting the lectures and, without retaining anything from them, dumping them out on the exams. An undergraduate at the University of Iowa explained, “I’m into gambling and I’m into cheating in lecture classes. The only times when I feel alive in those courses is when I’m cheating. I’m really concentrating then, like when I’m on a river boat [casino].” This student was disappointed to learn that probably some of his professors did not care whether he cheated or not. “That sorta takes the fun out of it,” he admitted, “but that explains why it’s often so easy.”

  A few years ago, a professor at a southern university suspected a student of plagiarism. What did the professor do? Absolutely nothing. The messy case didn’t seem worth the anxiety or aggravation, so he graded the assignment as usual and passed the student on.

  —Allison Schneider, Chronicle of Higher Education reporter

  Catching cheaters, like fighting grade inflation, requires a large amount of a faculty member’s time and energy, and because the promotion, tenure, and salary system of the research university never rewards a professor for detecting a student plagiarist, or any other species of academic thief, why would a faculty member spend preci
ous minutes, hours, even days or weeks in this endeavor (tracking down the exact source of a plagiarized paper can be a trek across a desert)? Moreover, apprehending the cheater is merely the first step in a very laborious process: countless reports to fill out, many faculty and student disciplinary committees at which to appear and present the evidence in the case, and always the threat of the accused student suing the accuser.

  If grading student work puts faculty on the path of least resistance, resulting in grade inflation, then discovering a plagiarist or exam cheater often triggers a sprint down that path. As the southern professor told the Chronicle of Higher Education, exposing a cheater is not worth “the anxiety or aggravation” or time. Therefore, the best course of action is to do nothing. But what happens to faculty who—out of pride, honesty, or perversity—try to expose a cheater?

  Many faculty members interviewed for this book on this issue told a horror story about a professor who accumulated lots of evidence of a particular student’s cheating, then reported the student’s dishonesty to the proper university authorities. After a year of hearings before various university judicial groups and no judgments, the student sued the accuser. The professor’s school provided no legal aid for him or her; then, in a triumph of Johnnie Cochran—like lawyering, the student got off scot-free, and the professor had to pay exorbitant court costs and damages. He or she was financially and emotionally ruined by the case.

  Faculty repeated versions of this anecdote so often—usually with the besieged professor as “a colleague of a friend at another university”—that the tale took on the character of an urban legend. A few cases like the professor’s have occurred, although never in this extreme form, but the accuracy of the story is much less important than the fact that so many faculty members believe it and invoke it as a reason for doing nothing about student cheating.

  Even professors who actually want to combat cheating discover that their universities will not help them in this endeavor. James Karge-Taylor teaches a lecture course in the history of jazz at the University of Arizona, and, in 1998, he discovered in a poll in his class that, of the 368 enrolled students, 25 percent had cheated on the first quiz. He had a simple request of his school, “I would like more help reading papers.” Apparently help never arrived. A late-1999 article about websites selling papers for students to submit as their own work mentioned: “The paper mills are keeping customers happy. Tim, a University of Arizona senior who buys around four papers a semester, recalls ordering an essay on Louis Armstrong [for a jazz lecture class] … . Five minutes later, he got a call from the company urging him to reconsider. One of his schoolmates had already ordered the same paper.”

  Nevertheless, in the bleak research university landscape, some faculty members at Big-time U’s manage to prevent cheating and plagiarism in their courses. However, their methods are very labor intensive. An Indiana University professor puts the following note in all of his course syllabi:

  A warning on original work vs. plagiarism

  An experienced teacher can easily tell the difference between original student writing and plagiarized work. Because you will have to write various exercises in class, I will have an excellent idea of your true writing abilities. Thus, when you turn in your major papers in the course, your writing—although more careful and polished than your in-class work—will still reflect your abilities. Your writing is like your signature, unique to you. To turn in someone else’s writing—professional critic, friend, tutor, website doofus, etc.—is foolish, easily recognized, an insult to your instructor and fellow students, and a good way to get yourself into serious trouble.

  NOTE: When you turn in your major papers in this course, you must also turn in your original notes, outlines, and drafts—be sure to print out the drafts after you do them. I will not accept a major paper without this material (it helps me gauge the quality of your research as well as the amount of work that you put into the paper).

  This instructor admits that he would not know what to do if a student actually turned in a plagiarized paper, but, fortunately, he has not discovered one since he added these paragraphs to his syllabi many years ago. Admittedly, his teaching methods are time-consuming-he has to read all of his students’ in-class and out-of-class work—but he believes that this is the only way to teach people to become better writers.

  In addition, he finds that requiring “notes, outlines, and drafts” is a useful pedagogical device, and one that also short-circuits plagiarism. The instructor remarked, “The plagiarist would have to deconstruct the bought or stolen finished product into draft, outline, and note form. He or she would learn far more about writing from doing this than writing the paper straight.”

  This instructor is not a typical faculty member at a major research university. Some of his colleagues at Indiana and other Big-time U’s also try to prevent cheating—but mainly with seating strategies in lecture halls, such as handing out various versions of the scantron exam so that no student sits next to another student with the same version of the exam. However, the new cellular phone technologies tend to defeat these strategies.

  Similarly, some faculty have embraced the new anti-plagiarism search engines on the web. In theory, they take a suspect paper and locate the original already posted somewhere on the web. In practice, as a reporter discovered, the search engines “fail to detect [papers] … with even the slightest amount of rewriting,” and, more to the point, they can only find papers listed in html and free to all (many of which are atrociously written). The anti-plagiarism engines cannot penetrate websites that require passwords, i.e., those that sell excellent recycled essays or, for a fairly high price, that supply an original paper to clients. Therefore, the best antidote to plagiarism on the web remains a teacher who requires writing in class and knows his or her students and their work well.

  At a time when many universities tolerate student cheating, some institutions have gone a step further and have created a culture where staff members write the papers and take-home exams for some undergraduates, particularly intercollegiate athletes. A national magazine remarked:

  Sometimes the schools are directly responsible [for cheating] … . A former tutor for the University of Minnesota revealed that she had written 400 papers for 20 [varsity men’s] basketball players between 1993 and 1998.

  The University of Minnesota academic cheating scandal was large in scale but not exceptional in occurrence. Indeed, athletic department tutors at every NCAA Division I school have approached or crossed the line between tutoring a student and actually doing some of the student’s course work. For example, in helping an athlete correct writing errors, the tutor rewrites the entire paper, and then the jock submits it as his or her own work; or, in typing a paper for an athlete, the tutor makes so many changes and corrections that the final product—submitted as the jock’s original work—is, at best, a collaborative effort, and more often a ghost-written one.

  In the Minnesota academic cheating scandal, three tutors, encouraged and rewarded by athletic department officials, brazenly composed whole papers and answered take-home exams for many basketball players, sometimes on subjects about which the athletes knew nothing, and in polished prose that some of these academically challenged jocks were incapable of writing. Not surprisingly, faculty members receiving these papers and exams were suspicious, but, in true Big-time U fashion, they ignored the alarm bells and graded the papers as if they were original student work.

  However, one assistant professor did complain to University of Minnesota authorities. He pointed out that in one of his courses, basketball “star forward Courtney James had [recently] turned in a paper that was the best he [the instructor] had seen in his nearly forty years at the university,” and that he clearly “suspected academic fraud.” Nevertheless, Minnesota administrators would not investigate or support the instructor, and so he gave the paper and the player a passing grade.

  Eventually, due to the competitive nature of the two daily newspapers in the area, the detail
s of academic fraud in the men’s basketball program at Minnesota emerged, including this assistant professor’s experiences. UM administrators then pledged a total cleanup—as they had after every public revelation in the long history of UM athletic department scandals. Yet, NCAA officials called the recent UM incident an idiosyncratic event; in reality, many tutors at other Big-time U’s could tell the press about academic dishonesty in their athletic departments (unfortunately, these revelations rarely emerge because most college towns have only a single daily newspaper, resting snugly in the local athletic department’s pocket, and the paper refuses to investigate the U’s college sports program or listen to tutors brave or foolhardy enough to come forward).

  Finally, however, it is important to take a step back and to place athletic department malfeasance—not only academic fraud but also cheating in recruiting and retention of athletes—within the context of the entire university. The Carnegie Foundation noted that:

  The tragedy is that the cynicism that stems from the abuses in athletics infects the rest of student life, from promoting academic dishonesty to the loss of individual ideals. We find it disturbing that students who admit to cheating often excuse their conduct as being set by college examples such as athletic dishonesty.

  Interviews for this book and P.S comments on the questionnaire support this Carnegie comment. A surprising number of students, particularly male sports fans, justified their academic dishonesty by referring to college coaches who cheated to win or ignored illegal off-the-field conduct by their players so that the offending athletes could remain on the team and help it win. During fall 1999, many students cited Peter Warrick’s involvement in a shoplifting incident at Florida State, for example, “Hey, this All-American thief [Warrick] should be in the slammer, not leading the ’Noles to the national football championship. When King Bobby [Bowden, FSU coach] lets his jocks cheat like this, why should Joe Blow college student act differently?”