A professor in the mechanical engineering department changed the syllabus for his class last week partially as a result of suspected cheating on homework problem sets.
Mechanical Engineering Prof. Hossein Haj-Hariri announced last week in his MAE 321 "Fluid Mechanics" class that he would no longer collect the weekly homework assignments in a box outside his office, partly as a result of the apparent cheating. The 100-student class is a requirement for all third-year mechanical and aerospace engineering students.
According to several students in the class, the professor allowed a student whose homework was allegedly stolen and copied to speak for about 15 minutes. The student indicated he often turned his homework assignments in a week early and found out his homework assignments had been stolen from the collection box and copied by other students.
The student also said he had experienced the same problem in a different class last semester.
According to Haj-Hariri, the cheating was discovered after the student intentionally placed false answers on his homework.
"When the homework was turned in, there were various degrees of overlap among four sets that were turned in with the incorrect solutions," Haj-Hariri said. "So we just followed up on that, and it turned out that apparently one student had, in a weak moment, taken the homework from inside the box and the others had unknowingly copied from him."
Haj-Hariri said he will change the grades of the offenders but said he does not intend to initiate honor charges.
"The Honor Committee is a student-run affair," Haj-Hariri said. "I told [the students] in the class and also in my office that they are always welcome to place charges if they want to. I would be willing to cooperate if they need me to be a witness. But for pedagogical reasons, I think the students who slipped would benefit more from just me dealing with them one-on-one, basically letting them know that this was a mistake but they can learn from it and do better."
The single sanction
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