How many students does it take to pass a test?
Duke University’s Fuqua School of Business has begun investigating 34 students after they collaborated on a take-home exam. Students are facing severe punishment, such as expulsion.
The test was a take-home, open-book exam assigned in March. The professor of the undisclosed class reported the incident after he noticed similarities in students’ tests. According to the administration, the students violated the honor code of the business school.
The administration’s response is justified; they trusted their students to have enough integrity to not cheat in such an informal situation. However, it is naive to expect that competitive graduate students will resign to attacking an exam on their own when there is no fear of repercussions.
But assigning take-home exams and trying to stop student discussion of test material is a wildly unrealistic goal.
The school officials are living in a dream world if they believe that students won’t do anything to get ahead. It’s a student-eat-student world out there, and all too often students choose good grades over honor.
This so-called collaboration is cheating. The students agreed prior to the exam to refrain from working on the test together.
“The university (system) rests on mutual trust between the school and the students,” UCLA associate English professor Lynn Batten said. “Dishonesty is dishonesty.”
Counselors, teachers and parents couldn’t stress enough ““ especially in high school ““ that good grades are the only way to get ahead.
Getting into a good college requires an extraordinary GPA. Getting into graduate school means selling your soul for that astronomically high GPA. And performing well in graduate school means a good job waiting when you get out.
It’s all about the numbers, not about how much you have learned, improved or grown.
It’s a cynical way to look at it, but that is how our society works. We focus so much on the product the process comes second to all else.
As for the Duke students, even if they didn’t believe they were cheating, they still knew they were betraying their professor.
“I am well aware we live in a world of gray areas,” Batten said. “But I would argue that it is easy to know what is or isn’t cheating. The honor code needs to mean something.”
On the other hand, a professor shouldn’t have been so naive as to trust the students and open up the opportunity to cheat.
The professor could have easily administered his exam in class, in a restricted setting, and still have made it open-book.
There are those students who do have enough academic integrity to restrain themselves from this type of cheating.
However, a more restrictive testing situation would prevent these overly competitive students from even having that temptation.
We want to move the emphasis back to learning, but that’s hard to do when the whole academic experience revolves around getting the grade.
Thus, employing more restrictive testing situations is the only way to make sure students perform with the most integrity.
We are not all cheaters. But it is hard to decide at which point students can be trusted to not take advantage of the system.
“Ultimately, student honesty relies on students,” Batten said. “And the administration needs to take student dishonesty seriously.”
Ideally, we wouldn’t even care about grades and GPAs. However, the university, and society, depends on quantifiable gauges of skill because it is practical and can establish clear standards.
So when grades are so important, professors can’t expect students to not take advantage of the system. At the same time, students need to practice the integrity that they will employ in the post-college world.
And, hopefully, at least one of these students will have a tougher time doing that when they don’t have 34 other people helping them out.
Is this collaboration cheating? E-mail Bissell at abissell@media.ucla.edu. Send general comments to viewpoint@media.ucla.edu.