Some students at Ohio State need to be reminded that cheaters never win.
At OSU, the Committee on Academic Misconduct was created to deal with cheating.
In the 2001-2002 academic year, 287 cases were brought before the committee. In 225, or 78.4 percent of those cases, the student in question was found to be guilty.
The most frequent charge was, in the words of the COAM report, “giving and/or receiving aid in an unauthorized manner,” with 68 instances. Turning in someone else’s work as your own was the second most frequent charge with 63 instances, followed by 60 cases of plagiarism.
The COAM report showed the majority of academic misconduct cases, over 50 percent, were in 100-level courses. The next highest category was 500-level courses, with just over 15 percent of all cases.
Academic misconduct cases were overwhelmingly more prevalent among undergraduates, according to the COAM annual report. Two hundred and seventy-six cases were brought against undergraduates, leaving only 11 cases against graduate students.
The report also concluded the three programs with the most cases of academic misconduct were computer and information sciences, history and industrial engineering. There were 48 cases from the CIS program, 37 from the history program, and 34 incidents from industrial engineering.
Stuart Zweben, chairman of the CIS department, said his program may have more cases of academic misconduct because students make it easy to detect.
“They’re submitting it as their own work, but there’s some place in the materials they submitted where we could determine that somebody else actually was the author,” Zweben said.
Zweben also said his program is unique because computer programs are often turned in as assignments. Software written by faculty at other universities can be used to compare programs submitted by students to see if they are similar.
The program raises flags when it detects similarities, and instructors can decide if this merits investigation, Zweben said.
Zweben said the sheer number of students involved is also a main factor in the CIS program having the most cases of academic misconduct. He said that in an extremely large class, students may feel they are indistinguishable from the sea of faces and therefore believe they can cheat without getting caught.
Richard Ugland, academic program coordinator for the history department, agreed that high rates of academic misconduct go hand in hand with teaching large numbers of students.
“Last year we taught, to be exact, 16,755 students. Of those, 11,960 were from the 100-level GEC courses,” Ugland said. “Some of it (academic misconduct) is just sheer numbers.”
Ugland said the high number of cheating cases in his department is not necessarily bad. Rather, he says the history department may be more vigilant in detecting cases of academic misconduct.
“I do think, in this department, we take it quite seriously, to maintain this integrity and pursue cases where we have some suspicions,” Ugland said.
Robert Lundquist, a professor in the department of industrial engineering, said his department also attempts to ferret out cheating if it is suspected. He said he personally takes pride in finding and reporting cases of academic misconduct.
“I say, ‘I will catch you, and I will fry you.’ Honestly trying to throw a little bit of a scare into the students,” Lundquist said. “I have zero tolerance, I’m a bit of a madman.”
Professor Lundquist said students should be punished or they won’t stop cheating.
“If professor A (fails to report cheating) and then professor B does that, and then professor C does that, the student has cheated three times, and the penalty has been a zero on a homework assignment. Whoop-dee-do,” Lundquist said. “There needs to be institutional memory of this.”
Ugland said professors and teaching assistants are never happy about finding cheating, but when they do, they follow the rules.
“We know it goes on, but we just hate the fact that it goes on, that we found it in our class,” Ugland said.
Kitty Kisker, COAM coordinator and co-author of the annual report, said cases of academic misconduct are on the rise.
“Over the past four years, incidents of reported cases is up, largely due to an increase in plagiarism,” said Kisker.
Kisker said this is due to resources available to instructors which can detect plagiarism, particularly if students have pulled work from the Internet.
“In the past there may have been some undetected cases,” said Kisker. “Now it’s much easier to use a search engine and find an unattributed source.”
