Notes from Acadaemic Integrity Workshop

1. John Dorbolo - Oregon State U.

a. What are the problems? Distance education, are the problems really different.

i. What are the opportunities to use technology in cheating?

ii. Honor codes are not designed for distance education

b. Background

i. Taught large courses, intro. Students have no real objectives in these courses. Students in these classes report that they are bored, especially the readings.

ii. Used vignettes, or cases to stimulate students. This technique engaged the students.

iii. The students would pick a point of view, and then their readings were tailored to their own point of view. This led to a need to package reading materials, that were different for each student. And knowing students, they were getting the wrong packets or reading materials.

iv. Intro students do not know how to interpret other points of views, or do critical thinking about points of view other than their own. Sometimes they can not even do that for their own point of view. John had students discussing the points of view as groups of like minded students, and managing that was very different and difficult.

v. John now teaches this course on line entirely. With different modules and belief systems.

c. The question of cheating comes up in all discussions with faculty. Does technology make it easier to cheat. What are the ethics in distance education or information technology. The value of technology in education is proportional to the need for technology in that educational process. ONLY USE TECHNOLOGY IN WAYS THAT MAKE EDUCATION BETTER.

d. We do not have gridlines to help decide the use of technology in education. Information technology does not have a driving force for ethics guidelines behind it.

i. In distance ed

(1) there is spatial separation between teacher and learner.

(2) There is the influence of some educational institution. It is organized.

(3) It is technology mediated, beginning with the use of the postal system and correspondence education. Correspondence courses are distance education

(4) there is some type of two way interaction or communication between teacher and learner.

(5) there is an absence of a learning group – there is a different dynamic and the students are not connected to each other or to the instructor. Is that the case – what does it take to create a class in an online environment, even a non-traditional group.

(6) it is necessary to define the parameters of cheating precisely, especially for the student.

ii. Ethical issues that belong to the distance education environment. For example, we have standards of what instructors must do, and what is the student’s responsibility when he or she has an instructor who is incompetent.

(1) are these students learning, how well is distance education working, is the research acceptable.

(2) where does the ethical responsibility lie, with the student (easy) or with the institution (difficult).

(3) motive: what is the purpose of distance education. Is it to replace faculty with no faculty or adjuncts – do we need a teacher or instructor for distance education. Is education a relationship.

(4) alienation – we have to have an ethical commitment and is that possible in an internet environment. Distance education is NOT value neutral – there are agendas in distance education (also in WebCT). Distance education has some inherent values that are different from those for FTF education.

2. Session 2 – John again

a. There is no way to keep up with the changes in technology. Just because a thing can be done does not mean it should be done applies to technology perhaps even more so.

b. How to cheat – technology assisted cheating

i. Hacking – cheating and theft by experts. A lower level of hacking would be looking at source code or a Java script might show the answers to online quizzes. This is the war of the technologies. Changing the clock on your computer to send email late but to have an earlier date and time.

ii. Excuses and alibis – on line you can create excuses. I.e., send a corrupted file or an attachment that cannot be opened. Works better than having a grandparent die. There are a bunch of cheating books.

iii. The power of the institution to deal with cheating has increased. The institution can potentially scan everything a student looks at, and the electronic trail is far more definitive than the paper trail.

iv. It should be noted that many of the things can occur outside the education.

c. Electronic plagiarism – there are more than a 100 of these sites that sell or give away term papers. Some of the sites try to distance themselves from cheating. But most do not disguise their purpose.

i. If you get this type of paper, you can mine the bibliography, a time honored tradition.

ii. Cut and paste is a much easier than writing something.

iii. Grazing is a practice of going to a web site and cut and paste information from the site.

iv. There are sloppy and irresponsible ways to do research on the web. It is possible for a student to cut and paste materials so often and in making notes and references that they could fail to recognize they are actually plagiarizing.

v. Software solutions – there are a number of commercial and freeware solutions to use to find plagiarism. How do we use the technology.

(1) do we test all papers

(2) do we test some or suspicious papers.

(3) check them all and return failed papers to the student. The student can then fix it.

(4) there is software than can track grazing and provides footnotes as you copy and cut and paste.

vi. What we want from the student often is original thought. We believe, especially for the humanities, that thought is original. Why is that important?

AFTERNOON SESSION
BERNARD GERT

1. Cheating as a concept

a. Cheating encompasses ALL of academic integrity.

b. You know about morality by knowing what is immoral. The negative term carries the weight and meaning.

c. Is cheating just deceiving. Almost all cases of cheating cause some deceit or deceiving. It is a subclass of deceiving.

d. Cheating is like breaking a promise.

2. Example – cheating is not deceptive all of the time. E.g., a boss who cheats at golf, everybody knows. This is not deceptive, because every body knows.

a. Cheating is not playing by the rules that are common knowledge.

b. Public systems

i. Everybody knows what the rules are

ii. It is rational for people to follow the rules.

c. The rules of the game have to be clear to all participants and games are the most clear example of public system.

d. Morality is like a game in that sense. Everyone should know the rules, and do not or should not act immorally.

3. Cheating is nor normally justified, unless the cheating serves some better goal. Or cheating’s behaviors are moral within a larger context.

a. The overall rule of morality is to reduce suffering. But that is an incomplete (wrong) view.

b. You are allowed to break a moral rule whenever you are willing to allow everyone else to break the same moral rule in the same setting. There are ten rules (not included). Moral rules are part of a moral system which consist of the rules and the procedures for when you can violate the rules and doing mitzvah.

i. If there is disagreement, with equal parties, there is no correct solution. Thus it is okay to agree to disagree.

ii. Most of what morality is, is not controversial. We agree on an enormous number of situations.

iii. Cheating is just one of the moral rules that we are talking about, it is only one of the ten.

c. One of the moral ideals is to not break the rules.

4. Generally speaking cheating is unlike the other rules in that cheating seems to be intentionally. So someone who breaks the rules and does not know the rules, it is not really cheating.

a. You want to make the rules as clear as possible.

i. For example, it is not plagiarism if you cite the source.

ii. You do it because you are likely to misinterpret what they are saying or you get the blame. If you cite, the originator is blamed.

b. Analogy between cheating and sports or games.

i. Cheating is not illegal in games, in a game it is called ‘fouling.’

ii. Why do students feel differently about cheating in school in contrast to cheating in a game.

c. Example – you are just cheating yourself.

i. Cheaters don’t think they are hurting themselves.

ii. Cheaters don’t care

iii. Why punish them if they hurt only themselves.

d. When we are in an academic situation, we ARE in a competitive situation. In competitive situations, we do not cheat.

i. In golf, you cheat if you want to. If you don’t want to cheat, you do not.

ii. In school, you cannot cheat yourself, because you are not in the game. You can only cheat the other students, just like in a golf tournament, you do not cheat yourself you cheat the other students.

iii. As an instructor, you are not in the class and you do not get graded. Only the students get hurt.

iv. As an instructor you are not cheated, you are deceived, wronged, etc., but you are not cheated.

v. ONE NEEDS TO SEPARATE CHEATING FROM RECEIVING A WRONG OR BEING WRONGED. A student who cheats wrongs others and only cheats those with who he or she is in competition.

e. If it is the students that are being cheating, we want the students to know that they are being cheated that they are being injured in some way. Students have to understand how cheating hurts them. How do we do this.

i. What we do is give students a choice. For example, let students choose what rules to have. I.e., should exams be proctored. Let the students vote and decide.

(1) if the students vote, you learn about which classes are difficult, which instructors care or don’t care. Etc.

(2) the students know what the consequences.

(3) no downside?

f. What are the rules that will give students a fair opportunity to provide, to make the rules clear. Etc.

i. When the penalty is too minor or not important, the rule maker is to blame.

ii. There has to be a substantial penalty.

iii. This is cheating not breaking the law

iv. You should have consensus, at least about cheating in the university. The obvious cases are obvious, the non obvious cases can be modified by new rules or statements about those situations.

5. Cheating occurs in a competitive situation, how do we let students know that this is the case

Dartmouth’s grading situation where they record grades as student’s grade plus mean grade for that course.

b. This could be a point for what the penalties are for cheating – that the individual student is harmed by students who cheat.

c. If you can change the attitude so that people who cheat would be shamed or ashamed, and change the climate so that cheating is not popular.

6. What are students doing –

a. They are being unfair to their student colleagues

b. They are NOT cheating the teacher, the teacher is the referee and can not be hurt.

c. The university may be hurt, but only in the long run.