According to Ms. Rosen, Blum attempts to find a culturally-based explanation for why two-thirds of the college students surveyed admit to plagiarizing. She believes it has to do with coping for unrealistic expectations of success and a certain efficiency of effort so they can move on to the next item on their agendas. However, Blum quickly succumbs to the moral surrender of victimization theory: "We can only partly blame the individuals who cheat."
A few points. First, the results of self-report measures can be unreliable and reflect sampling bias and extraneous factors like social desirability (e.g., telling the survey people what they think they want to hear). Second, I really don't think that students are all that different. Granted, technology has made it more convenient and easier to cheat, but students have always been under pressure with expectations (getting into medical school and the like), and plagiarism is expedient. Third, students sometimes cheat because they can. No one who cheats expects to be caught. I've seen A students do it. Why? I personally think it's the thrill and danger, the challenge of pulling it off right under the professor's nose; they think they are above suspicion and perhaps a little narcissistic, thinking the same rules don't apply to them.
Are the professors really as clueless or hapless as Blum seems to suggest? Probably not. I and others uncovered and took action in multiple cases. But there are other salient issues in terms of time and effort in pursuing cheating, and especially for those of us untenured professors, there was a lot of political pressure not to pursue the matter. I mention two such incidents in passing in my Christmas Eve post.
At the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, I had assigned group projects in my graduate systems analysis course. The group consisted of a few foreign students from east Asia. They decided to submit a paper on certain techniques with which, unknown to them, I was especially well-read. I recognized the original passages and even the use of secondary sources. The paper was little more than stitched-together paragraphs from multiple sources, copied verbatim without attribution to the sources they used, definitely in the tradition of what Blum calls "patchwork". Literally the only thing original about that paper was the title.
What readers who have not been in academia may not know is that I simply couldn't just fail them on the assignment, but I had to work within the defined process: there was a limited time after they submitted their work for me to file academic dishonesty charges. I had to document the cheating, and they had a right to respond to the charges. I remember at the time I needed a copy of the last original source. I went to the library and (of course) found the book had been recently renewed. I tried to get them to recall the book; they refused. I couldn't get anything through interlibrary loan within the available window of time. I couldn't even get them to confirm the identity of the person checking out the book because it violated the student's "right to privacy". Yes, nothing quite like a librarian trying to rationalize aiding and abetting academic dishonesty. Never mind the fact the library's actions undermined the whole concept of an author's intellectual property, which constitutes the very essence of a library.
I really had more than enough evidence and called in the group of students. (I have been told I can be quite intimidating.) Almost immediately 3 of the students confessed and apologized profusely. The remaining student was angry, defiant, and unapologetic. He dismissed plagiarism as a quaint American construct and obsession. I made it clear to the tough guy that this was not acceptable behavior and any further incidents would result in more serious charges. I could have put them in danger of washing out of the MBA program by issuing C's or lower in the course, but I felt that they deserved a second chance.
The new Indian MIS professor next fall decided to pick up the graduate DSS course I voluntarily relinguished in making what turned out to be a bad decision to teach COBOL at the undergraduate level. A few weeks into the semester, he knocked on my office door and asked me to read a paper one of his students submitted, thinking it sounded "too professional." I instantly recognized it as verbatim from a classic MIS paper on group DSS written by the late Gerry DeSanctis. I was so focused on the content, it wasn't until some time later that I checked out the student's name--and was stunned to see it was the very same rogue plagiarizer.
I then went down the hall to stick my head in my friend Bob's office. I mentioned the guy's name to Bob and asked him if he had had the same guy in any of his classes. He said that he had had the guy the prior semester. I asked, by chance, if he still had any of the guy's work; Bob said he didn't think so, unless the guy didn't pick up his paper from outside Bob's door. As luck would have it, he never picked it up. (Why should he? He still had copies of the original sources...) Bob had given him a B+ on the paper. I glanced at the paper--and this time it got personal: He had patchworked the paper from the books I required in my system analysis course. I went to get my copy of an IEEE volume of readings and started pointing out the stolen passages. Bob now was fully engaged, uttering an expletive and asking me for my class texts, as he became obsessed with putting together the patchwork.
In the meanwhile, word of the serial plagiarizer surfaced in our informal MIS department. A well-known female MIS professor was indignant that I allegedly was violating the student's rights and had no right to know what he was doing in any other class. The male informal chairman of our area argued that I was sabotaging their foreign student recruitment program.
My two junior faculty colleagues caved in to political pressure and refused to pursue the matter any further. I got nowhere with the Dean's office; they refused to take action against the student, despite the evidence, and made it clear that any attempt to file a grade change (which would have resulted from changing his project grade to an F) would be quashed as unacceptable double jeopardy. (The facts that the student did not earn the grade he got and did not live up to terms of our agreement in good faith were irrelevant to the administrators.)
It was at the time I decided to escalate the matter to the university administration. It really wasn't about the student per se. It was because there was a systemic failure of others in the system to do the right thing. The fact that I was personally attacked (not the student) reflects the integrity of the people with whom I was working.
But to be honest, I wasn't that surprised. Early in my stay at UWM, another faculty member related to me the experience of another faculty member. He had administered multiple-choice tests on mark sense forms. He naturally got suspicious when students started complaining that there were mechanical scoring errors made because they had correct answers scored as errors. The professor suspected they were cheating by changing their answers. To test this theory, he made copies of the next exam's mark sense forms before handing them back. Sure enough, the dishonest students went to the well once too often. Students caught cheating often respond with ferocity (I think due to loss of face).
Another instance of academic dishonesty surfaced during my stay at the University of Texas at El Paso. (UTEP had recruited me primarily due to my research record and their pending application for business school certification. I'm not saying my resume made the difference, but the chairman of the department was eager to close the deal to get my resume in the file on time.)
To provide a proper context, I was teaching a database management course; my syllabus clearly stated that homework assignments (roughly 10% of the course grade) were not group assignments, but were to be the student's own work. This one exercise focused on learning basic SQL, a basic language used to retrieve desired data from a database. The exercise included description of a 15-column table, and one of my first questions involved specifying a command to return all the data in the table. I expected a simple command like select * from mytable; About 6 papers into the batch I was grading, I found an unconventional response. This student decided to write out all 15 column names (instead of '*')--but not only that, but the column names appeared in a random (vs. sequential) order. And then a few papers later, I found the very same thing: not only a random ordering of column names, but the same random order of column names. At that point I put the assignments side-by-side, and all the responses were clones, including for less structured questions.
At the beginning of the next lecture, I mentioned that I had come across papers that violated my syllabus academic honesty policy and reminded the students of the policy. At that point, one of the young ladies at the front of the class asked if she was one of the students. She, in fact, was, but I refused to acknowledge it, saying I would deal with the students in private at a later time. The young lady was not satisfied. She raised her voice at me saying, "I'm not a cheater--I don't need to cheat. I'm an A student. They'll never believe you; they won't let you do anything to me." I had never, in the pursuit of my 4 degrees, personally seen a student throw a temper tantrum in any class. This was escalating out of control: Do I call campus security? Do I dismiss the class? If I respond too strongly, the students will side with their peer; if I refuse to meet the challenge, I appear weak. I calmly suggested that we should talk about this after class. She responded, "No! I want to talk about it RIGHT NOW." I was about to dismiss the class when one of the female students in the front row cautiously expressed support for the idea that the matter should be discussed outside of class. One or two others chimed in their support for the same, and the angry woman, finding no support for her approach, retreated with folded arms across her chest, glowering at me for the remainder of the lecture.
I momentarily forgot about the student waiting to see me after class, dropping by my office on the way to lunch with some colleagues when I hear my office door slam shut behind me. It was the young woman still seething at me. This was not good; a single white male professor alone with a coed behind a closed door is in a politically precarious situation. I told her to open the door. She refused. She then drew a deep breath and then out a blood-curdling scream, "I am not a cheater!" I can see professors through my window pane coming out of their offices looking in the direction of my office. I demanded that she leave my office immediately. She refused. I then walked out of my own office and went to lunch, leaving her there.
The girl decided to appeal to the Dean of Students Office. In fact, I never met with the Dean in person, and at no time was I invited to a meeting or asked to respond to any allegation from the student or her cronies. That's how the university operated under the unconscionable, pathetic leadership of Diana Natalicio. The fact that the evidence of wrongdoing was overwhelming, not to mention the fact that I never identified the student as a suspect, but she outed herself in front of a full class. Her strategy seemed to be pressuring other students to falsely allege that I had orally contradicted the policy I specified in my syllabus. One of the students in question came to me and told me what was going on. She had other classes with him, including on a project. But once there, he refused to go along with her allegations--and found the Dean of Student Affairs arguing with him, saying the student was in the tank for me. He was very concerned because she responded to his "betrayal" by locking him out of the computer project they were assigned to in another class, and he wanted my advice or help in dealing with the issue. And I have to smile at his response when I thanked him for his support. He responded impatiently, " I didn't do it for YOU. I did it because of THE TRUTH." He was the kind of man whom gives me hope for the next generation. I have one of the few photos ever taken of me as a professor; he had dropped by my office before leaving for the MBA program at the University of Virginia, saying he liked to have pictures of people whom made a difference in his academic career.
The Dean of the Students continued on his personal bizarre prosecution of me. One day I answer my phone, and he's on the line. "You better not do it." "What in the world are you talking about?" "You know what you did--don't insult me!" I really had no clue. I never had a discussion with the young woman after she invaded my office. It was like getting blood from a stone. I eventually flesh out that the student told me I had threatened to blacklist her with employers. First, that never happened. I've never made a threat like that in my life to any person. Second, I was a first-semester professor--I didn't even have any industry contacts. I was in the publish-or-perish game. No one in industry during my 5 years ever paid me a dime or even made an offer for consulting. Why did the young woman smear me? I eventually discovered that before the incident, this woman--who never had me in a prior class and did not know me--had started listing me as a reference in applications she was sending out. Now she was in a state of panic over what I might tell them. It never even occurred me to me someone I didn't know would use me as a reference without my knowledge or consent. I think I got one postcard from a New York area employer and acknowledged knowing her but had nothing further to add.
The Dean of Students decided that the young woman won her appeal and demanded I give her full academic merit for her assignment. I simply refused to acknowledge the farce. And then, on the very next assignment after the kangaroo court decision--the same two students did it again. Surprise, surprise. Keep in mind we are talking about 10% or so of the final grade over multiple assignments.
I faced some of the very same types of problems Blum mentioned, twenty years ago. Grade inflation, coddling parents, students with unrealistic expectations, bad study habits and inadequate preparation for the courses they were taking, poor writing skills and study habits, etc. I think many of my colleagues simply gave up and went with the flow. (I had one colleague whom simply gave his programming students pseuodcode for their programming assignments, so they were little more than typing exercises with minor tweaks.) I made a decision when I was a professor that the buck stopped with me; there is not a lot I can do to make up for years of incompetent teaching and parenting, but when I found I had MIS major seniors in my classes at UTEP whom couldn't write a computer program on their own, I refused to simply give up on my students. I at least had control of what was going on in my classroom, and I had to accept my professional responsibility to make the best of the hand I was dealth. Parents who enforce the rules will tell you they aren't always popular with their kids. I wasn't there to make students feel good about themselves; I was their teacher.
