Breaking the Pledge Academic dishonesty at Middlebury

Author: Cecilia Goldschmidt, Mary Lane and Derek Schlickeisen

The scene was unexpected: after a student informed her of a typo in one of her in-class exam's questions, a Middlebury professor left her office for the exam room with the intention of offering the class a corrected version of the question. Upon entering the room, however, she found two students huddled together, comparing answers.

Caught red-handed, the students soon found themselves in front of the Academic Judicial Board for cheating on their exam. Yet the case took an unexpected turn.
"The students had been caught cheating, but they were arguing to the Judicial Board that the professor wasn't allowed to be in the room," explained Professor of Spanish Miguel Fernandez, who serves as secretary of the Faculty Council. "There was a real question of whether what that professor saw could be used at all."

The incident offers a dramatic example of what a number of faculty ("We're not just talking about a handful anymore," said Fernandez) see as a fundamental disconnect between the College's Honor Code and the prevalence of academic dishonesty - particularly in certain departments.

Yet it is a disconnect which extends to perceptions of just how big the cheating issue has become. While some faculty have used the term "crisis" to describe current levels, many students report little concern that dishonesty in coursework is impacting their experience at the College.

"From my experience, I don't think cheating is a big problem here," said Mark Kelly '10.

This week, The Campus examines the issue of academic dishonesty and a growing debate about how the College should respond.


To proctor or not to proctor?

Middlebury's Honor Code was a bit of a culture shock for Laurel Gray '10, who transferred to the College from Syracuse University. "It threw me off to have an Honor Code at Middlebury," she said. "I was so accustomed to being heavily guarded during exams. When I had exams at Syracuse, TAs were always roaming the rows so that kids wouldn't cheat. There were four copies of an exam in big letters, and proctors would make sure that people sitting next to each other didn't take the same copy."

Yet, for a student body whose vast majority is accustomed to the idea of unproctored, self-scheduled and take-home exams, the idea of a professor sitting in on an exam - as some faculty have proposed - seems wholly foreign to the concept of the College's honor system.

"The Honor Code shows the teacher knows we are responsible and are grownups who aren't in high school anymore," said Nathalie Michiels '10. "It wouldn't matter for me if the teacher were there in the classroom or not because I don't cheat, but it would mean they're taking away their trust in us, which I don't like."

Together with their attachment to the school's culture of honor, many students with whom The Campus spoke said they had little personal exposure to the cheating issue on campus.

"I personally have never witnessed cheating," said Felipe Sanchez '10. Mark Kelly '10 said that while he had seen one instance while on campus, he didn't consider cheating a "big problem" on campus.

Students like Christopher Rogers '09.5 typified what appeared to be the most common exposure students have had to major forms of academic dishonesty - rumor.

"I know from talking to friends that it does happen," he said.

So would students support proctoring of exams? While some students said that professors may believe it is necessary - and that, as non-cheaters, they would not particularly mind ­- others found the notion offensive, both to the spirit of the honor system and the convenience it allows.

"I think teachers should definitely have the option of staying in the room during an exam…if they think the integrity of their test is in question," said Kelly.

"I would say that at a school like Middlebury, you're here because you worked to get here," said Rhoads Cannon '11.5. People's work should be their own. [Professors] can sit on top of the desks. It doesn't make a difference to me since I'm not a cheater."

Others, like Sanchez, disagreed.

"I think the flexibility of the Honor Code is just so pleasant," said Sanchez. "The other day, I was able to start a test an hour late and end it an hour late. I sent an e-mail to my professor and he simply responded, 'No sweat, I trust you.'"

Kaitlin Ofman '10 said she believes the proposed modification might weaken the honor system itself.

"The unproctored test system shows such a high degree of faith in the students and it definitely influences the atmosphere of the classroom and of the test," she said. "We're adults and we're here to learn how to be adults. I feel respected by the Honor Code, and I think it's a really important part of the culture here."


They're losing faith in the system

At its April 11 meeting, the faculty voted to express a non-binding "sense" of the body that the College should consider a revision of the Honor Code during its quadrennial review next year which includes a provision allowing professors to proctor in-class exams.

While this vote - and a more general discussion of potential solutions to cheating on campus - emerged as the biggest newsmakers from the meeting, follow-up interviews with participants suggest that a more alarming perception may be taking hold among faculty in certain academic departments.

"Some professors in these departments feel as though there's rampant cheating going on with their exams," said Feranandez. "But when they have taken students to the Judicial Board, they haven't been found guilty, so there's a lot of frustration with the process. Some faculty feel powerless, and they're losing faith in the system."

As the Faculty Council's secretary, Fernandez finds himself in a unique position - the public face of a body in which professors air their opinions on matters like cheating anonymously. None of the departments whose faculty describe cheating by their students as a "crisis," for example, wished to be identified.

These anonymous stories, however, offer a picture of faculty members find themselves in the unenviable position of bringing forward cheating cases when, despite what they feel are clear circumstances, the burden of proof falls very heavily on the professor.

Fernandez cited as an example a case in which four students gave the exact same incorrect numerical answer on an in-class exam.

"The probability of them getting the same answer on this question was like getting struck by lightning 10 times in a minute ­- a statistical impossibility," he said. "And they were all cleared. We've really reached a point where some professors think they simply cannot prove anything without a confession from the students involved."

Members of the Judicial Board acknowledge the difficulty in proving the presence or absence of cheating during a hearing - particularly in cases of in-class cheating.

"When you're looking at a plagiarism case, you're actually looking at highlighted sections of the paper, usually with the source material it's lifted from, all right there in front of you," said Dean of the College Tim Spears, the Board's chairman. "But with cheating, you're talking about behavior, and it's tricky to evaluate."

Spears said that in cases of cheating, unlike in cases of plagiarism, the fact that tests usually seek a relatively uniform "correct" answer make the process of proving misconduct much messier.

"You have to weigh the possibilities of how test answers got to be so similar, or how one answer managed to get onto another paper," he said. "And the evidentiary standard is preponderance of guilt - if it looks like someone's more guilty than not, then they're found guilty. But people on the Board want to feel like they're making the right decision,
and the benefit of the doubt frequently goes to the student."

Spears said that while some faculty before the April 11 meeting wanted to propose a vote to unilaterally change the Honor Code to allow for the proctoring of exams, further consideration of the issue revealed that the Faculty Council alone lacked the power to do so. Instead, according to the College's Handbook, any amendment to the Code would require "a referendum in which two-thirds of all students who are currently registered for classes vote, and in which two-thirds of those voting support the change, subject to ratification by the faculty."

Associate Dean of the College Augustus Jordan suggested that proctoring may not even represent the best countermeasure to cheating. Jordan, who authored an extensive 1998-2000 survey of cheating habits at the College [see right-hand sidebar], said research has revealed that education and symbolic acts of participation in a university's honor code in fact do more to reduce the incidence of academic dishonesty.

"It's the faculty's obligation to ensure that academic integrity is being maintained at the College, through whatever mechanisms are appropriate," Jordan said. "But the data show that honor codes are the most effective way to do that."

Jordan cited two measures implemented at Middlebury since the publication of his study in 2000: the symbolic ceremony immediately following Convocation in which first-year students sign a statement agreeing to the Honor Code (a redundant step, since enrollment contracts at the College already include this agreement), and the practice in which first-year seminar professors discuss how to abide by the Honor Code in coursework while at the College.

"At Middlebury, we have a unique opportunity to influence the kind of numbers you see in these sorts of surveys," said Jordan. "Small communities really can buck the trend by having a collective discussion in a way that large universities have a more difficult time doing."

Jordan also made an effort to place cheating at the College in context. While his data reveal that 83 percent of students at the time had cheated during the course of their Middlebury careers, he argued that the numbers were inflated because the survey includes an entire section on homework cheating - a category wholly apart from dishonesty on exams and papers. Career cheating on exams and papers came in at 53 percent and 40 percent, respectively.

The faculty is awaiting the publication of more recent, finalized results from a survey conducted by a student in Assistant Professor of Economics Jessica Holmes's "Economics of Sin" course.