Academic Cheating and Social Relationships

alleya
Mon, 24 Apr 2006 22:42:07 +0000

pafather,

You’re right that it’s almost impossible to tell when someone takes more time than allowed on an exam or uses disallowed resources. silveryms and spoon! are also right that most exams tend to be open book and have adequate time. In addition, most exams are long enough that after 4 hours, a person would rather throw in their hat than keep working past the time limit.

However, for every student there will be times where they will have a closed book exam or will want just 30 more mins on a test where they know the prof won’t give credit for work after time. Then there is a temptation to cheat. This is where the beauty of the honor code really shows. If we were to eliminate all temptation to cheat, having a low occurence of cheating would not be so impressive. By instilling in students the pride and honor such that even when tempted, they still don’t cheat, we accomplish something far more lasting and important.

How do we know that people don’t cheat this way if it’s so hard to catch? Because we’ve asked them. The survey that cghen mentioned was given (anonymously) a few years ago as well. According to this survey, 36% of students had cheated in some way during their time here at Caltech. This still sounds like a discouragingly high number of students. But only 6% of students had cheated more than twice. (I don’t have this number at hand, but I think it was about 12% that had cheated more than once.) This supports cghen’s claim (and the BoC’s general belief) that people don’t cheat repeatedly. Caltech is an incredibly stressful place and people make mistakes. You can compare our numbers with that found by the Center for Academic Integrity which reports that 75% of college students cheat during their career.

If you want, I can flood you with many more statistics on the number of cases the BoC sees, how many convictions we have, and how many people we put on leave. I was chair of the Board of Control for a year, charged with the duty of safeguarding the Honor Code, so I’ve had this conversation many times over.