The Tufts faculty voted on and passed a new academic dishonesty policy at its Apr. 19 faculty meeting.
The previous policy stated simply that faculty members were "encouraged to report allegations of academic dishonesty to the Dean of Students Office." Now, all incidents must be reported.
"We are no better and we are no worse than other schools," Dean of Students Bruce Reitman said. "[Academic dishonesty] is a universal problem for everybody and that is because of all of the new sources out there - the Internet, etc."
According to the proposal presented to the faculty, that system "[did] not allow [the Dean of Student Affairs] to effectively track students who may violate honesty policies with regularity, encouraged negotiation with every decision, and lead to gross inconsistencies from professor to professor, department to department."
To rectify these issues, faculty members will be required to report all incidents of academic dishonesty to Reitman starting next year.
They will also have a set of disciplinary guidelines at their disposal in an attempt to improve consistency from case to case.
"What faculty had to do before was deal with grading consequences - some saw it as a teaching experience for the student and assigned no grading penalty, and some thought the students had violated the biggest rule of the academy and...didn't deserve a grade or to even be enrolled in the course any further," Reitman said.
"Students felt this was unfair: Some faculty handled cases very differently than others. So we got many requests for change," he said.
The new policy went into effect immediately at the Wednesday meeting, and Reitman expects that the number of cases reported will "certainly" increase. "This is expected because all faculty are now required to report to us," Reitman said.
That required reporting is intended to bring consistency.
Previously, "with some faculty deciding one way and some deciding not to even report certain incidents of dishonesty, there was no way of know whether this was a student's seventh of eighth allegation," Reitman said. "So with the new way, we will be able to see repeat offenders because of the central reporting to my office."
"I think that a uniform policy serves everyone's interests better," English Professor and Department Chair told the Daily in an e-mail message. "Students know what to expect if they cheat and so may be less likely to violate the policy on academic honesty; faculty aren't put in the position of trying to "protect" students from the consequences of their actions; and the Dean's office has a better opportunity to come to terms with the problem of academic dishonesty."
Edelman feels as though the Dean's office will do an even-handed job of managing the requests.
"I've worked with the Dean's office for many years and I have every confidence that students will be treated fairly and even-handedly and with enormous sensitivity to the particular circumstances at issue," he said. "I'm also confident, though, that the Dean's office will insist that students must accept responsibility for their
actions."
And the faculty reaction to the policy? "It's long overdue," Jonathan Strong, Lecturer in English, said.
Strong believes that the policy is an important step toward improving academic integrity at Tufts, and said "the more we can move to a truly honest system," the better.
He also said that faculty have been discussing more concrete measures to halt plagiarism for quite some time.
Instances of plagiarism, he said, "are extremely upsetting for a teacher."
"I feel the University should back us up in instances when to discover as I have, that someone has handed in someone else's work," he said. "It's a real breach of trust not just for the teacher, but the other students."
Strong said that additional measures should perhaps be in order, particularly when an abundance of Internet resources make the prospect of plagiarism "much more tempting."
In Strong's perception, the plagiarism situation has gotten "worse by far" in the last 10 years. "It's pretty awful," he said. "It's amazing how un-subtle a student can be. Our eye for prose is sharper than theirs; we can tell the difference between student writing and professional writing."
Other institutions take an alternative approach to academic integrity: a student-driven honor code. For example, Georgetown University is an honor code school, according to according to Faculty Executive Director of the Honor Council and current Mathematics Professor Jim Sandefur.
"We take academic integrity very seriously here," said Sandefur of Georgetown, which requires all incoming freshmen to take a three-hour online plagiarism tutorial.
Reitman sees no honor code in the near future for Tufts. "We all inherited a school without an honor code," he said. "It is hard to impose that on a place that doesn't already have it."
An honor code requires a certain culture, he said. "The hardest part of an honor code is the requirement that you [a student] must report a peer that you know is cheating or you will be in violation of the code," he said. "I think something similar to what we have, a more modified honor code, works better."
According to Reitman, the most often reported instance is of plagiarism is "unauthorized collaboration...especially for research courses in the humanities or sciences where people work together to gather information but must write separately."
To take on this problem, Tufts plans to expand the use of Turnitin.com, software that was piloted last year in the biology department and that will be available campus-wide starting in fall of 2006.
The Internet database program, Turnitin.com, compares students' work against previously published material. The Biology department and the Dean of Students' office have been using the Web site since January 2005. The Dean of Students' office has used the program as an investigative tool in cases of academic dishonesty, and some biology professors require that students turn in assignments to the online database.
With Turnitin.com, students submit their work to its online database. According to the Web site, the automated computer program analyzes the submitted document and compares it to over 10 million student works and over 4.5 billion pages of Internet content, as well as millions of pages of previously published books and journals.
So far the services used by the University have cost about $1,000. According to Reitman, it should cost another $5,000 to implement the technology across the campus.
"It is not a very expensive system," Reitman said. "Other schools have had great success with it, and our bio department has also had great success."
Biology Professor Michelle Gaudette used the Tufts pilot program last term in her Bio 13 classes. "It was a little bit more work to figure out," said Gaudette, "but once we worked through some of the student's downloading problems, it worked well."
Professors receive a color-coded originality report, offering the percentage of similar phrases in a student's paper to other works. Gaudette said she expected a certain level of similarity since all the lab reports she dealt with were on the same topic.
While Gaudette praised the software for its ability to compare lab reports across all the Bio 13 sections, she also cited some important differences between human and computer analysis. "When I grade papers, I look for patterns in writing style and syntax, but the computer uses mathematical algorithms that just can't do that," Gaudette said.
"I hope students aren't disgruntled about this," she said. "We are using it to prevent outside collaborations and to teach better."
Biology Professor Colin Orians, who also used Turnitin.com last semester, applauded its ability to serve as a disincentive to plagiarism.
"I really liked how it worked, and I think it served as a good deterrent," said Orians. "I think there was a lot of cheating that wasn't caught before."
"More and more schools are using various techniques to curb the tide of plagiarism," Reitman said.
According to Turnitin.com, over 5 million students have access to the site's services, including students at Tulane University and West Point Military Academy.
Georgetown has been using the Web site since 2002. According to Sandefur, the university has had very little trouble using it. "It has caused fewer headaches than we expected, and has been used less often than we originally anticipated," said Sandefur.
Sandefur did mention a legal conflict over access by other institutions to student-submitted work through the site, but noted that Georgetown students reserve the right to negotiate with professors and avoid using the software.
"The Web site saves the professors who use it a lot of time," Sandefur said. "There are some professors who love it and some professors who don't use it at all."
"The program is not meant to serve as evidence to make a plagiarism complaint," Reitman said, "but simply to start a conversation between the professor and the student."
Reitman also said that it was not the administration, but the students who demanded that something be done about plagiarism. "Students at Tufts actually complained about the laissez-faire attitude about cheating here," said Reitman.
But sophomore Doug Terry, who used the site in Bio 13, doesn't share Reitman's sentiments. "I'm personally not worried about other students cheating and getting better grades; I work hard to earn the grade I deserve," he said. "I find it interesting that the site is supposed to 'spark conversation,' but in reality it is a way to accuse
students."
Neveretheless, the University must continually adapt to a culture of plagiarism.
"We live in a culture of short-cuts and of heightened emphasis on the 'bottom line,'" Edelman said. "In such a culture where everyone from politicians to corporate leaders seems to focus on the ends and not the means, it's no surprise that academic dishonesty seems to have increased over the past five years at Tufts and at universities across the country.
"Some students seem to forget that success is not measured by the grade they receive in a course but by the knowledge that they acquire," Edelman added.
- Kat Schmidt contributed reporting to this article
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