I am actually an engineering transfer student to UCLA, and I decided to take an online MATLAB programming class at UCLA in the summer before transferring. On the due date for a particular assignment, I had finished it, but a friend hadn’t and was struggling. I had just come back from work and was not in the mood to explain it to them, so I just emailed it to them and went to sleep. About 1 week after the class ended, I received an email about a possible case of plagiarism in my assignment, which obviously troubled me. I just had the meeting with the dean and I told him the truth, took responsibility, and asked about the consequences I would be facing. As soon as he said that suspension was likely, my heart dropped.
**Sorry, I accidentally pressed submit without putting the other half. Here’s the rest.
I know that cheating at UCLA or any university is a very serious deal, but I couldn’t imagine that the consequences would be that severe. I almost just want to give up now: my 2 year plan is now a minimum of 3, graduate school admissions will be 10 times harder, and my parents will be beyond furious. The one hour of sleep I gained that day will never make up for the countless hours I will spend catching up…
Enough with the ranting, here are my questions:
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Even though he said a 1 quarter suspension was likely, would it be possible I might get a more lax consequence like failing the class and getting the annotation, but keeping my student status? It is my first class at UCLA ever, and collaboration in programming classes is commonplace.
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If I were to get a suspension, what would you recommend I do in the 3 months I can’t attend? Should I find a job? Study ahead of time?
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Would it be even remotely possible to attend UCI ( I was accepted for Fall 2015) this year or another year? I have not done any of the registration steps there, and I understand the cheating annotation will still follow me.
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I know that you cannot receive financial aid if you are not a student, so I will have my fall 2015 financial aid rescinded correct? At the same time, I will also get my class and housing fees refunded right? So then would I only owe money for late cancellation fees?
Thank you in advance for helping me in this difficult situation.
it’s not clear whether you cheated or your friend cheated. Can you clarify?
My friend plagiarized my code, which I sent through email.
Yeah, you cheated. You are never allowed to share your source code, ever, with a student taking the same class. You’ll be made just as responsible as the individual who ripped off your code and likely just scrambled it/changed some variables around thinking it would pass detection. You admitted all this to the dean, so he’s just following procedure. Schools take it seriously, so it could be worse than a 1 quarter suspension
Thing is, you were probably never educated on this if this is your first programming class. Just like in law, lack of awareness of the rules is not a valid defense.
WRT to what you should do, if suspension is unavoidable, you can take classes at CC to continue to receive some aid. Was UCI the only other college you can go to?
I understand what I did is cheating, and I had no intent of “playing dumb” during my meeting. The thing is at community college, the professors don’t usually use anti-cheating software and the sharing of code is commonplace. That said, a good deal of my class (which was mostly transfer students) have meetings with the deans as well because we didn’t expect the high level of anti-cheating measures. Do you think they might take that into account? I know they don’t have a problem suspending all of us regardless, but I feel that if they see it as a trend, they might change their response…
I did also get into UCR as a transfer student, but I did not do any of the matriculation steps either. I could attend CC, but I have already fulfilled all my lower division prerequisites and general education classes, so it would be pointless other than to receive the aid.
I can sympathize with you, but the administration probably won’t. I don’t think diminishing factors like being a new transfer student are going to influence their consideration of your punishment, because they have to follow bureaucratic guidelines. Unfortunately, I don’t imagine you’re the first incoming class to get wiped out like this, they’ve seen it all before.
I go to USC myself and they really stressed the code sharing policy the first class for all of my programming classes, before we had a chance to submit a line of code. The software they use to detect cheating is really thorough, to the point that I’m surprised it doesn’t return more false negatives. Collaborating on code is so much more different than collaborating on essays etc. – once someone else’s solution enters your mind, it’s harder to see the answer to a problem in a different way. Thus it becomes really tempting to borrow someone’s hacks or conceptual approach, in the case of your friend. In many cases it may seem like there really is only one solution, but professors would never assign a specificated problem like that.
Changing variable names and scrambling the order of functions is useless in evading detection. Believe it or not, a lot of kids would cheat if they thought they wouldn’t get caught… A large deterrent is fear and awareness of the likelihood of getting caught. When that is absent, you get situations like your class. I think on a moral basis, it would be obvious not to share – or ask for – code, which is your intellectual property to begin with. Even if this wasn’t stressed in community college, the motivations behind people doing it should be clear – they want to do less work and in the process, forgo a lot of learning. This bypasses the intended learning outcomes of the class (figuring stuff out yourself) in pursuit of a higher grade.
In any case, it’s only one quarter and a transcript annotation, you can bounce back. Though I can’t affect the outcome of what you’re going through now, I can tell you that your attitude is mostly in the right place.You’ll have learned a valuable lesson early on rather than later. Since it’s your first class at a four-year, you can mitigate a little bit of the consequences by explaining it away with naivety and misunderstanding when you apply for grad school. You have 3 more years to prove you wouldn’t be involved in something like that again. In the mean time maybe take a step back from school, find some better friends, and take a delayed summer vacation.
Cheating on code is rampant at all UCs and that’s why they do crack down. Even at Berkeley. All the CC kids who act as if anything below Berkeley CS is beneath them and then when some get I to Berkeley, some has to resort to cheating.
http://guardianlv.com/2013/12/uc-berkeley-cheating-scandal-in-coding-class/
But I think since it’s a summer class, do you think you can enroll at UCI for fall.
When are you going to hear about the Dean’s decision?