A modified version of Andrew Daines’ Sun column on academic integrity has surfaced on the NY Times website (HT Mitch Alva). While he admits that the data that support his conclusions are sparse, he still recommends that Cornell take a stand on this growing problem:
Cornell and many other leading universities don’t require freshmen to take an ethics course. This is a big mistake. College can be a process of unlearning bad habits just as much as adding to one’s knowledge base. A philosophical grounding for goodness, honesty and integrity helps students to see the value of maintaining ethical standards or rising to them.
Sure, the causal link between a philosophical grounding in “goodness, honesty and integrity” and not cheating seems reasonable enough, but it’s less clear to me that students who take ethics classes are more likely to establish this grounding than students who do not.
This whole article took me back to a paper I wrote in high school about the optimal level of cheating that should be permitted in classrooms. The level of cheating is a function of enforcement: more enforcement = less cheating. Enforcement takes on many forms like making multiple copies of exams, walking around during tests, etc., but it can also entail simply raising the punishments for those who get caught. But enforcement also carries some costs– lost time by professors, class time wasted on controlling cheating– so the optimal level of enforcement is one that minimizes the total cost (cheating and enforcement) to the school.
Optimization involves some fancy math, which I won’t get into here, but my whole point is that it’s not clear to me that cheating is enough of a problem to mandate serious measures by Cornell to stomp it out. The costs might be more costly than the benefits.
As someone who has spent a lot of time discussing this with Andrew and others, I can give you his basic response:
Cheating is rampant at Cornell, and professors catch it all the time. But the standard avenues of discipline are time consuming and the punishments are not effective. In many cases, this has led to a level of resignation among the faculty, and some courses have even altered their curriculum and testing simply so they won’t have to deal with cheating. Cracking down would be rather simple: a sliding scale of punishments after a rapid, strictly enforced judicial process. Other ideas include an honor code or (yes) an ethics course.
In Engineering Speak:
The function cheating = f(enforcement) has a steep negative slope in the vicinity of its current level of enforcement, with a slowly varying positive second derivative. Thus ramping up the level of enforcement would coincide with a steep drop in cheating, and this drop would be sustained, perhaps over several orders of magnitude, before a local minimum is reached.
Thanks for the comment, Salem. I must ask, though, what you think constitutes “rampant”? Is cheating rampant if one out of every, say, 10 students admit to some sort of academic dishonesty (however small)? Or does it only become “rampant” if more than 20% of students in a class admit to cheating on an exam or paper. Not knowing any actual figures about cheating at Cornell or the ‘natural rate of cheating’ at other universities, it’s just difficult for me to call it rampant at Cornell from personal experience. But who knows, maybe I just hang out with an ethical bunch, or a bunch of liars?