The Honor Committee sponsored a forum last night to discuss ethical academic responsibility and the differences between faculty and student expectations of academic ethical principles.
The forum was held in the wake of strong faculty and student response to the statistical analysis of the final examination results for PHYS 142E, held in spring 2008. The analysis revealed widespread sharing of information about exam content. The final exam had several questions that were duplicated from the midterm and explicitly stated on its cover to refrain from sharing information with other students.
The results indicated that more than 60 percent of students who took the exam in the second sitting appeared to have used this unauthorized information to raise their scores.
The forum, moderated by Engineering Prof. Kay Neeley, featured Engineering Profs. Deborah Johnson and Eric Maslen on its panel, along with Jen Wilson, president of the Engineering Student Council.
Johnson expressed her belief that students have an internal desire to learn and "refrain from cheating, not because someone's watching them, but because that's the type of person they are."\nShe believed part of the cheating on the 2008 exam resulted from continuously changing academic norms.
"Institutions start out with a certain set of norms, and over time, the context changes," said Johnson, citing the Internet as an example as how the cheating could have been so widespread.\nExpectations are unclear when they are not explained, she said.
"It's easy to behave well when the norms are clear," she said. "It's harder to behave well when the norms aren't well articulated."
Wilson described the case as 'embarrassing' for the Engineering School.
"Is our system broken?" Wilson said. "Does it need to be fixed? I think there's plenty of room for improvement. I'd like to hope we go somewhere with that."
Maslen suggested one incidence of bad ethical behavior in this case had a ripple effect, inducing students who saw the first act to repeat it themselves. He described several hypothetical situations in which the cheating could have taken place but ultimately concluded the problem started out small.
"Who actually cheated? Probably only one person. A single act of cheating. One person walked out of the room, and walked up to one other person preparing for that exam, and maybe said, 'Read the midterm.' Clearly that first person cheated. Beyond that, it's hard to say," Maslen said.
Students, faculty, graduate students and members of the Honor Committee actively participated in a discussion. While some raised questions about possibly assessing grades differently or combating the temptation of cheating in large lectures, other students thought the responsibility to uphold ethical integrity falls on them.
"As students, we often expect professors to bear the majority of the blunt of enforcing ethical behavior," one audience member said. "[But] we need to hold each other accountable"
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