Geology lecturer Elli Pauli said the laundry list of cheating incidents in her classes – from collaborating on take-home exams to peeking at iPhones during tests – has reached a tipping point.
To combat what she calls an "epidemic," she enlisted extra proctors to watch test takers and banned group exams last year – when the number of cheating, plagiarism and falsification reports at GW reached an all-time high of 145 cases.
Last year, professors brought 45 percent more cases to the Office of Academic Integrity than they did during the 2010-2011 academic year.
“I’m guessing the issue is this idea that you have so much pressure, and you have to get ahead at any cost,” Pauli said. “But it’s getting more rampant."
While Pauli prefers to deal with instances of cheating herself by failing students on the assignments, more professors than ever are asking GW to step in and handle the cases, Tim Terpstra, the office's director, said.
The rise was in part driven by the 55 graduate students caught cheating, a 16 percent jump from last year. Plagiarism, the most common type of academic integrity violation, made up just more than half of the cases – 8 percent fewer than during the 2010-2011 school year.
Cheating, which Terpstra describes as the “old-fashioned” copying off another student’s paper, made up about 16 percent of cases. The rest of the academic integrity violations include falsification, fabrication and facilitation of instances.
Professors are quick to Google suspicious phrases, and many also use online plagiarism checking software, like TurnItIn.com and SafeAssign, Terpstra said.
“I think professors take it more seriously now,” he said. “They’ve read in the newspapers and seen on the Internet different examples of cheating and plagiarism that take place at colleges and universities and the workplace.”
Eleven students charged with academic integrity violations last year were repeat offenders, the most ever. Terpstra said the trend could mean students aren’t learning from their mistakes, and that the office should “consider stronger sanctions, more preventative work to help these students.”
Terpstra added that he would continue to urge professors to encourage students to use the University’s free paper writing help service, the Writing Center, to seek help on papers and citations. He said he has noticed some of GW’s schools and departments made it a priority in the last year to root out cheating and plagiarism.
The GW School of Business, which brought in a new dean in 2010, saw a 4 percent increase in students caught cheating or plagiarizing last year. The school’s cheating cases represent about a quarter of GW’s total incidents – a rate that is disproportionate to its overall number of students.
“Sometimes it’s a new dean coming to town and they take it more seriously, or they hear horror stories on cheating. It does lend itself to a lot of gossip. It can sound like everyone’s doing it,” Terpstra said.
Neil Cohen, an associate professor of finance who sits on academic integrity panels, said talk about different cases is often “shrouded in secrecy” between students, professors and administrators even as cases increase.
He said even though watercooler talk sometimes revolves around academic integrity, mentions of the instances faculty meetings are rare. There should be more open discussion about violations and cases, especially as the rates go up, he said.
“We don’t have any procedure to notify our community that these meetings take place and what happens in them,” Cohen said.
Elli Pauli needs to look back in the mirror to see why so many of her students are cheating. I had a class with her last year where a significant number of students were caught. She allowed us to work on the lab in groups, where individual effort was hardly required. Then, for the lab final, she expected students to work alone. What an unreasonable request, when students were able to work together all semester. While I don’t support cheating by any means, I can see how compelling it is when the University employs crappy professors like Elli Pauli who use bad teaching methods.
Seriously?
I’ve taken courses with her too and I completely disagree with you. At no point does she send a message that it is OK to rely on others’ work for the labs. Even in the syllabus she says it is OK to discuss things with a partner or in small groups, but to do all your work independently. Anyone who just does a part of the assignment copies another part from a partner is shorting themselves. As for the lab final being a solo experience – since when are finals group activities?
I took a class with Elli Pauli too. Group work in labs in the sciences is pretty standard. The reality is, everybody *should* be doing the work, but generally it’s the most motivated person in the group. If you’re the kid who’s just copying answers, the only person to blame if you aren’t prepared for a lab exam is you. Last time I checked, being unprepared doesn’t give you license to cheat.
I never had Pauli for a class, but she ran one of my labs. The work she assigns is ridiculous for an Intro class. We are talking about labs that are 15 pages long and just down right excessive. I agree, cheating is bad, but when you are giving impossible assignments and you are an awful teacher to begin with, you can’t be complaining.
Study high, test high
Amen, brother.
Wow, some of these things are actually cheating? Maybe not so much in the real world
In MBA school (not GW) I did all of the following “cheating” activities:
- Collaborating on take-home assignments, or at least having partner(s) cross-check them
- Having a partner review papers submitted and vice versa for clarity and accuracy (but not write them for each other)
- Downing a bottle of red wine with, then hooking up with a curvy, gorgeous (not quite divorced) blonde classmate in her car in the back of the parking garage.
Ok maybe the last one MIGHT be cheating ;)