w a n d e r i n g

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By Michael Penn MA’97 Photos by Jeff Miller

DAVID HOFERER NEVER KNEW HOW TO CHEATuntil he became a teaching assistant. As a student, he worried too much about his assignments to think about subverting them. Now, his instruction is getting subverted,and that has piqued his interest considerably.

“I’ve learned about a lot of cheating technologies that Inever knew about before,” says Hoferer, who is pursuing adoctorate in environmental studies. “And some of them arereally pretty ingenious.”

Such as the time a student taped a cheat sheet to the underside of a baseball cap. Or when students programmed equations they were supposed to memorizeinto sophisticated calculators. Or when one student saidthat he was looking around for the clock — which appar-ently he thought was on his neighbor’s paper.

All of those things have happened — or allegedly havehappened — during examinations in Physiology 335, a five-credit leviathan of a course that Hoferer has assisted forfour semesters. With an enrollment that usually exceedstwo hundred students and a thorny set of four two-hourexaminations, the course is like a semester-long stress test.During midterms, some students become so frazzled thatthey forget to fill in their names on the answer form.

Occasionally, students also forget their honor, a realitythat keeps teaching assistants on patrol during examinations.

“I don’t like to watch them. Sometimes I feel like thewolf watching the sheep,” says Hoferer. “But all it takes isone person cheating to make the test unfair for everyone.”

This is the new terrain of academic integrity. In an agewhen cheating has evolved to be faster, easier, and oftennearly undetectable — when Internet sites sell pre-writtenpapers, when computers come with cut-and-paste functions, when fifty bucks buys you a programmable calculator, and when even the most timid student can use a handheld digital device and sneak onto the Internet in themiddle of an exam — no one can afford to look the otherway. Universities, which strive to uphold the high virtue offair play, are being challenged as never before to instill aspirit of honor among their students.

And it’s not easy.In Physiology 335, instructors take extra measures to

derail academic misconduct. Exams are scheduled duringevenings, so that they can be held in larger auditoriumswhere there is room to put empty seats between students.They’ve even outlawed hats. But there always seems to be anew fault for some determined cheater to discover. Duringan examination this spring, for example, one test-takerreported hearing repeated beeps from a neighbor’s cell

phone and suspected she was using the phone’s text messaging function to get answers from friends. “We’dnever thought of that,” says Andrew Lokuta, a lecturer who coordinates the course.

“I think we can catch a lot of it,” he says. “But howmuch we miss, we’ll never know.”

THAT’S WHAT SCARES MANY PROFESSORS.As they grow wise to their students’ ways, they’re makingdiscoveries that seem to suggest that there is a lot morecheating going on than anyone imagined — and worse,nearly everyone is getting away with it. After hearingreports that his students were reusing papers for his intro-ductory physics course, for example, University of Virginiaprofessor Louis Bloomfield ran 1,500 assignments througha computer program he designed to look for possible plagia-rism. In spring 2001, he accused 122 students of copyingothers’ work, initiating one of the highest-profile cheatingscandals in modern academia. Eventually, forty-five students were kicked out of school, and three more hadtheir degrees revoked.

The Virginia case may be the most prominent weedgrowing through the ivy, but it’s far from the only one. Scan-dals have surfaced at universities throughout the UnitedStates and in places like China and Australia. And UW-Madison has certainly not been immune. From 1996 to 2002,490 cases of academic misconduct were formally reported tothe dean of students office, resulting in sanctions rangingfrom lowered grades to suspension from the university.

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Professors say cheating is on the rise among college students. But can they do enough to stop it?

Not included in that total aretwenty-seven accounting students whowere accused this April of improperlycollaborating on a take-home exam.According to accounting departmentchair John Eichenseher, the studentswere allowed to complete the exam outside of class so that they would befree to attend a business school guestlecture. The speaker? Sherron Watkins,the Enron whistleblower who broughtto light the company’s shady accountingpractices.

These students are, of course, merelythe ones who got caught. It’s hard toknow how much cheating really goes on:the goal of all cheats, after all, is to goundetected, and it’s probably safe toassume that the vast majority of themsucceed. About the only way to assesshow many students really are cheating isto ask them to fess up.

Researchers began doing that in the1940s, arriving on college campuses witharmfuls of anonymous surveys that priedfrom students information about theirpast transgressions. The measures obvi-ously aren’t perfect, relying as they do onpeople being honest about their dishon-esty. But the results have shown a definite trend over time. Most surveysdone in the forties observed that less

than one-quarter of students admitted tocheating on an assignment at any pointduring college. Now, using the samemethods, researchers find that 50 to 80percent of students own up to the deed.

One 1994 study reported that 89.9 per-cent of undergraduate students said thatthey had cheated at least once in college.

“It’s getting to be more and more of a problem, and we know less and less what to do about it,” says JamesWollackMA’93, PhD’96, an associatescientist in the School of Education’sTesting and Evaluation Services office,which, among other things, tries to helpprofessors design cheat-resistant testsand testing environments (see sidebar,page 39).

In 1996, Wollack set out to discoverthe extent of UW-Madison’s cheatingproblem. Instead of asking students ifthey’d cheated at any point in the past,which he considered vague and inconclu-sive, he visited a dozen undergraduateclasses immediately after an exam andadministered an anonymous survey aboutthat one test. About 5 percent of therespondents said they had copied answersfrom someone else during the exam.

That number — which doesn’t evenattempt to quantify plagiarism or otherforms of cheating that go on outside examrooms — adds up fast. Based on thatratio, if someone were to give the wholecampus an examination, you could betthat more than two thousand studentswould have a case of wandering eyes.

“The data show it’s happening everytime a test goes on,” he says. “Over fouror five years of college, that’s a lot ofopportunities to cheat. I think it’s veryserious news.”

CHAPTER 14 OF THE UW SYSTEMadministrative code defines six types ofacademic misconduct, ranging from plagiarizing parts or all of a paper, to giving a friend a test answer, to forgingacademic documents. Students who commit or even assist someone else inany of these transgressions “must be confronted and must accept the conse-quences of their actions,” the code states.

It would be hard to find anyoneamong the faculty or administration whodisagrees. Professors usually put sternwarnings about cheating in course syl-labi, and many discuss their expectationsopenly in class. The UW Writing Cen-ter, a popular resource where studentsgo for help with term papers and otherassignments, offers classes in the dan-gers of plagiarism, and its online guideto citing sources states bluntly that theuniversity “takes very seriously this actof intellectual burglary, and the penaltiesare severe.”

Delivering on those promises, how-ever, is more challenging than makingthem. In 2001–02, seventy-five studentswere charged with acts of academic misconduct, according to the dean of students — less than two-tenths of 1 percent of the university’s enrollment.Only two students found guilty of cheat-

ing were suspended during that year. Sixwere put on probation. Five failed thecourse in which they cheated, and threemore were removed from the course. Byfar the most common punishment —

36 ON WISCONSIN

None of the students who agreed

to talk says that he or she has

cheated. Yet all have seen it hap-

pen. Most of it, they say, stems

not from premeditated deception,

but from momentary desperation

which was levied in fifty-two cases —was to award the student a lower gradeon the work in question.

Some who look at those numberswonder if they belie the university’s toughtalk about cracking down on cheaters.“Why are there so few instances of cheat-ing that result in serious disciplinaryaction?” asks Ralph Cagle JD’74, a professor of legal ethics. “Is it that cheat-ing isn’t really a problem here, or is it thatwe don’t enforce the rules?”

But other professors say those num-bers indicate the difficulty of enforcing— not disdain for — the rules.

Virginia Sapiro, a professor of politi-cal science and associate vice chancellorfor teaching and learning, says facultyput a “high priority” on fighting aca-demic misconduct. But they lack the time and support to do it especially well.“We try to find various ways to preventit, and to catch and deal with it when ithappens,” she says. “But it is part of agrowing pile of responsibilities that havefallen on faculty since the Internet.”

Proving cheating is labor intensive,and most of the labor rests with the faculty who suspect it. If a professorbelieves a student is cheating, he or shemust gather evidence, confront the stu-dent, and then prepare a report detailingfindings and sanctions. Depending onthe sanctions, the report may be filedwith the dean of students office, which

facilitates the process and offers studentsan opportunity to appeal the professor’sdecision. Appeals are heard either by anexaminer appointed by the dean of

students office or a standing reviewboard. In either case, the burden of prooflies with the accuser.

“You need the evidence,” saysSapiro. “Often, professors will findthemselves in situations where they suspect students of having copied some-thing, but that’s not going to be goodenough in a judicial process.”

Many faculty say that those proceed-ings chew up time that they do not haveto give. “Most of us barely have enoughtime to do a decent job teaching classes,let alone have the time to prosecute a single student,” says Gregory Moses, aprofessor of engineering.

But time is not the only problem.Accusing a student of academic miscon-duct inevitably becomes a contentiousmatter that takes an emotional toll. “You take it personally,” says SusanSmith, an associate professor of nutri-tional sciences. “It eats away at you.”

When Smith suspected one of herstudents had plagiarized large sections ofa final paper, she spent a week deliberat-ing whether to press the issue. Finally,she did, calling the student in for a private meeting. The student burst intotears, saying she didn’t know she’d doneanything wrong. “I had no basis to judgethe veracity of her statement,” she says.

“What was I supposed to do — put heron a lie detector?”

That sense of frustration echoes notjust at UW-Madison, but at universities

across the nation. In one survey of facultyattitudes, Donald McCabe, a RutgersUniversity professor, found that 55 per-cent of professors “would not be willingto devote any real effort to documentingsuspected incidents of student cheating.”

Instead, they seek alternative routesto the formal channels, such as handlingcases privately, focusing on prevention,or even changing their teaching. Moseshas radically de-emphasized homeworkin computer science classes, for example,because students frequently copied eachother’s answers. Out-of-class assign-ments are now done in teams and countless than 20 percent of the grade.

Moses is frustrated by the compro-mise, which he says probably hurts students in the long run because they getless exposure to hands-on problem solv-ing. “But we gave up,” he says. “We werefighting against an overwhelming force.”

IT WOULD BE EASIER NOT TO KNOW.For Cathy Middlecamp PhD’76,

MS’89, a distinguished faculty associatein the chemistry department, those hal-cyon days of ignorance ended when sheoverhauled her Chemistry 108 course toinclude more writing assignments. Soonthereafter, she found herself questioning

FALL 2003 37

During an examination this spring, one

test-taker reported hearing repeated

beeps from a neighbor’s cell phone. The

student suspected she was using the

text messaging function to get answers

from friends.

her students’ work. There was one paperin particular — a book review from astudent who just oozed enthusiasm aboutthe insights he’d gained by reading it.“This made no sense,” says Middlecamp,“because the book was incredibly bor-ing.” She grabbed her personal copy andfound its conclusion copied word-for-word into the paper, with no attribution.

A few semesters later, a teaching assis-tant who suspected a handful of studentsof plagiarizing sent around an e-mail to all180 students in the course, asking anyonewho may have forgotten to cite sources tocome reclaim their paper and make thechanges. It seemed like an innocent wayto deal with an isolated, and perhaps inad-vertent, problem. But then came seventyresponses, most from students whowanted to revise their papers.

“This is not why I entered the teach-ing profession,” Middlecamp says. “I don’twant to be the cop in my classroom.”

Ironically, the same technology thatmakes cheating easier has allowed Mid-dlecamp to catch more of its perpetrators.

She reads papers at her desk, with aGoogle search engine open on her com-puter screen. Sometimes it takes onlyminutes to find that paragraphs havebeen heisted from Internet sources. Forthe past three years, Middlecamp hassnared two to four students per semesterin the net of this rudimentary detectivework. She knows there are others. “I onlycatch the dumb ones,” she says. (One stu-

dent who didn’t get away with his deceithad lifted entire paragraphs from a text-book written by Middlecamp herself.)

As punishment, those students usu-ally have their grades docked. But theyalso get a conversation with Middle-camp, who says she would rather explorewhy students cheat than dwell on howthey’re penalized. “Plagiarism raisesmore questions in my mind than itanswers,” she says. “I’m much moreinterested in trying to figure out what’sgoing on with my students than I am inthe sanctions.”

Although professors say they sensecheating is on the rise, most are at a lossto explain why. Technology obviouslyenables it. So, too, may a general malaiseof societal ethics, where fact-fudgingaccountants, drug-doping athletes, truth-dodging politicians, and plagiarizingjournalists and book authors set less-than-inspiring examples. Students aretraditionally great rationalists, and, in aworld where cheaters seem to flourish

more often than perish, some of theirrationalizations can seem almost rational.

Yet the students who get caught defysimple categorization. Some are defiant,but many are complicit. Some seem to behabitual offenders, while others insistthey’ve made a one-time-only misstep.Many are struggling students, trying foran edge. But many others are at the topof their class, and determined to stay

there. “I look at their GPAs and think,‘Why do you need to cheat?’ ” says LoriBerquam, associate dean of students, whocoordinates academic misconduct cases.The answer, she learns, is often fear.

“A lot of students come here used togetting good grades, and when theydon’t, that’s when they feel that theymust resort to something else,” saysMicaela O’Neil, a sophomore.

“You’re so scared of not doing whatyou want to do because of one class,”adds junior Heather Lilla.

None of the students who agreed totalk about cheating for this story says thathe or she has cheated. Yet all have seen ithappen. Most of it, they say, falls not intothe class of coldly premeditated decep-tion, but stems from momentary despera-tion. Students fall behind on assignments,and then make Faustian bargains to theircomputer screens in the middle of thenight. They cut corners — by cutting andpasting — because that’s the deal thatallows them to get some sleep.

“I don’t think anyone is proud ofcheating,” says Chris Miller, a juniorbiology major. “People realize that thereis no honor in it. I’ve been tempted tocheat before, and I think most peoplehave. It comes at three in the morning,when I don’t have time to do this, and Iknow that tomorrow morning I can justget these answers from someone else.”

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“A lot of academic misconduct cases

involve situations where the student

didn’t think that [he or she] was doing

something wrong. There’s a lot of

education that needs to go on.”

Still, Miller and other students saythey are frustrated by the complacentattitude many of their peers — and evensome of their instructors — take towardacademic dishonesty. “I don’t thinkcheaters are particularly scorned here,certainly not the cheaters [for whom] it’san occasional thing,” says Miller. “I thinkthat’s pretty accepted.”

Few students resist cheating out offear that they’ll be caught or severelypunished. From their perspective, thathardly ever happens.

THE RELATIVELY LOW NUMBERSof academic misconduct cases may con-tribute to that perception. When profes-sors don’t report cases to the dean ofstudents office, they may inadvertentlyplay into the hands of habitual cheaters,who can skate by on pleas that they’ll“never do it again.” That is one reasonBerquam advises faculty to involve heroffice, even when the offense seemsminor and the sanctions are light.

“Faculty are very forgiving, and theprocess of accusing a student and actu-ally proving that misconduct took placetakes time,” Berquam allows. “[But] thisis a learning institution, and these casesare part of the learning process. We needto be engaging students in a dialogueabout this, because the discussion is itselfa tool for instruction.”

National surveys show a consider-able gap between what professors andstudents define as the boundaries ofacceptable behavior. A study conductedin 2001–02 by Duke University’s Centerfor Academic Integrity found that 55percent of students said it wasn’t “seriouscheating” to ask peers for answers totests they’d taken in the past — some-thing nearly all professors say clearlycrosses the line. Neither did half of thosesurveyed say that falsifying lab data constituted serious cheating. Only aboutone in four students responded that cutting and pasting without attributionconstituted a serious breach.

“A lot of academic misconduct casesinvolve situations where the student did-

n’t think that [he or she] was doing some-thing wrong,” says Wollack. “There’s a lotof education that needs to go on.”

It does not help matters that evenprofessors can disagree about the defini-tions. Some faculty allow students to col-laborate on assignments, while othersconsider that no better than copying

answers on a test. Is it okay to use anexam the professor gave in last year’sclass as a study aid? Many professorsthink not, and decry the fraternities andsororities that maintain old test files. Butothers encourage the practice and even

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