By Shane Quinlan Arlington, Vice Chair of the Honor Board
Note: The opinions expressed in this periodical are solely those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of the Honor Board or any other entity.
A few weeks ago, I published some aggregate statistics about Honor System violations and investigations in The Stute. The overall feedback received from the student body, faculty, and administration was one of keen interest – and I hope that today’s installment invokes similar interest and engagement. Ultimately, the better that every member of the Stevens community understands the Honor System, the better it can function. For this week’s article, I have taken the data on cases reported since the Fall of 2008 and analyzed it to determine what courses and departments have the most cases reported, and an overall breakdown of what kinds of violations are reported. Ultimately, I believe that the statistics show us that the Honor Board has been hindered in performing its function by faculty either refusing to report or failing to notice violations occurring in their classrooms.
The first statistic I will consider is the number of cases reported in a given course during those years. In a total of 302 cases considered, only 78 courses were represented. Of those, 30 courses had only one case reported during the timeframe investigated, where 48 had two or more. Only 28 courses had four or more cases reported, and those are shown on the bar-chart below:
From this chart, it is easy to see that there are a few courses which have a disproportionate number of cases reported. Both General and Chemical Engineering Thermodynamics (E234 and CHE234) make the top 5, with a combined total of 48 cases reported, or roughly 15.9% of all cases reported. The second highest number of cases reported for a course came from Engineering Design III (E231), representing 12.3% of all cases. It is my opinion that these very high percentages do not reflect particularly higher rates of Honor System violations occurring within those courses. These courses are both examples of professors taking a keen interest in the Honor System, and taking due diligence to ensure that potential violations are detected and reported. These reports were overwhelmingly made by the professors with “hard” evidence accompanying the reports.
Moving from single courses to departments, I determined how many violations were reported within each department, and discovered that of the 302 cases considered, 81% of the cases occurred in only 7 departments, as shown below:
Interdepartmental Engineering (courses with an E___ code) represented the largest portion by far, which is not surprising given that two of the courses with the highest reported incidence rates are E232 and E234, which alone account for ¼ of all cases the Honor Board has investigated in the past six years. In looking at these data, I was strongly reminded of Stephen Walter’s article of a few weeks ago, where he investigated the Civil Engineering department’s attitude towards Honor System violations. Ultimately what Stephen found was that many professors were working outside of the Honor System, handling infractions without reporting them to the Board. It is my belief that these kinds of vigilante actions account for the incredibly low number of cases reported within certain departments.
As such, I would like to take a moment to remind everyone, both students and faculty alike, that it is a core tenet of the Honor System that all violations be reported to the Honor Board. Even in cases where faculty adjudication, wherein a student confesses to a professor directly for a minor violation, the proper paperwork (faculty adjudication form) must be filed with the Honor Board. For any assignment or test worth more than 13% of the course’s final grade, professors may not adjudicate the matters internally. As a note to students: if you are ever approached by a professor and given an ultimatum or told that your grade is being adjusted based on an assumed violation, it is your right and responsibility to report the matter to the Honor Board, and it is our duty to ensure that the proper protocols are followed and that your rights are protected.
Now that we have considered where the reported violations are occurring, it is also interesting to consider what is being reported. In the past six years, the overwhelming majority of cases reported are considered “unauthorized aid,” wherein a student receives some kind of aid in completing an assignment or assessment (quiz/test) that was not allowed by the course policies. A massive 87.7% of recent investigations fall into this category. The second largest category is plagiarism, which accounts for 8.3% of the cases reported. The only other significant categories are “falsifying an attendance sheet,” representing 1.3% of cases, and “take / taken exam,” which is the Honor Board’s shorthand for a student employing another person to take an examination or quiz for them, which represents 1.7%.
Given that “unauthorized aid” covers almost all of the violations reported to the Honor Board, it may be interesting to further break down where that aid was given/received:
From this, it is clear that the majority of all cases reported to the Honor Board consist of receiving unauthorized aid on a quiz, exam, or final exam – in total accounting for 62.9% of cases reported in recent years. From my experience at International Center for Academic Integrity conferences, this is somewhat abnormal, as most schools deal with higher incidence rates of plagiarism or homework related violations. This raises an important question: are we ignoring cheating that occurs on homework assignments? Perhaps the faculty are not catching or not reporting homework-related violations, or perhaps the “group-work” mentality has obfuscated much of the unauthorized collaboration that no doubt occurs on weekly assignments. This is certainly a question that interests me, and one which I hope the faculty will take seriously.
As always, if you have any questions, concerns, or comments, please feel free to email me at sarlingt@stevens.edu.
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