All Posts Tagged With: "plagiarism"

Expulsion not even on the table, university criticized for being ‘lenient’

At least 15 students in the Foundation Year Programme at the University of King’s College have been accused of passing off someone else’s work or idea as their own. Program director Peggy Heller said the questionable papers are all responses to the same text: The Divine Comedy by Dante Alighieri. She didn’t give details or say exactly how many students will be facing a hearing.

UPDATE: At least 7 king’s students guilty of plagiarism

The students are scheduled to meet with Heller and Stephen Kimber, the academic integrity officer, on Monday and Tuesday.

During the hearings, students will have a chance to state their case. Heller said students are free to bring an advocate, such as a student or a lawyer, if they are uncomfortable speaking for themselves.

There are around 300 students enrolled in FYP. After a lecture on Friday morning, Heller told them no one would be expelled. “The worst consequence that would be contemplated at this point would be failing the paper,” she said, “and then lesser ones would be having marks deducted.”

If found guilty of plagiarism, it would be a first offence, Heller said.

Kimber said these are the first allegations of plagiarism at King’s this year. “It’s not like this is happening regularly.”

This was the fifth paper of the term and it was due two days after the FYP midterm. Every essay assignment includes a description and a warning about plagiarism.

FYP student Sam Tait said it’s “pretty bogus” that a student caught plagiarizing wouldn’t face expulsion. He said students have known the consequences of plagiarism since high school. “I don’t think there should ever be more than one offence,” said Tait. “I understand someone making a mistake and not really understanding that paraphrasing is plagiarism, but to say that they’re going to be lenient on first-year students, they’re not really following protocol.”

According to the intellectual honesty section of the King’s calendar and the FYP Handbook, the penalties for plagiarism “may include assignment of a failing grade, suspension or expulsion.”

Generally, when a student is suspected of plagiarism at King’s, the marking professor will type in the suspicious phrase or idea in an online search engine like Google. Unlike Dalhousie University, King’s does not use Blackboard or Turnitin.com, a plagiarism detector.

Heller said these online programs take away from the close relationship between students and professors that King’s is known for. “This would ruin the bond of trust,” she said. “I was talking to a tutor today about it and he said it just changes the way you read papers because instead of thinking this is what the student is thinking you start thinking oh, is this really the student’s idea.”

But these allegations have forced Heller to rethink the university’s policy.

Implementing Blackboard and Turnitin.com would make communication between professors and FYP students easier and allow King’s to create a permanent bank of papers so professors would be able to compare essays from year to year, she said.

FYP is known for its intense curriculum and high admission standards. It is geared toward students who love to read and write and “enjoy intellectual dialogue,” according to the King’s website.

In last year’s National Survey of Student Engagement, FYP students ranked themselves the happiest and most content with their first-year university experience, compared to students at other Canadian universities.

Despite at least 15 allegations of plagiarism, Stephen Kimber said he believes that King’s reputation remains intact. “I think it’s good that people know that these things will get flagged.”

This story has been republished with permission from unews.ca where it originally appeared Dec 3, 2010.

Government to develop province-wide policy on assessing student behaviour

After a storm of controversy hit Saskatoon over reports that the city’s school board was planning to remove penalties for plagiarism, the government is stepping in to develop a province wide policy on assessing behaviour.

Early last week, the CBC, National Post, and other media outlets, suggested that a new report card system for Saskatoon that aims to separate student behaviour from learning outcomes would include eliminating penalties for late marks and plagiarism. By Thursday, the school board had denied that that was the case. “What’s being represented in the media is certainly not what we’re trying to do in the school division,” school board chair, Ray Morrison, told the CBC. Students found to have plagiarized will indeed be given a zero and whether or not to give late marks will be left to the discretion of teachers, Morrison added.

In its earlier story, the CBC had interviewed superintendent John Dewar and English teacher Katie Kehrig, whom the school division had referred for an interview. Similarly, the National Post reported that “Mr. Dewar said that if a student handed in a paper that was clearly plagiarized, the teacher could give the student the opportunity to rewrite the assignment, instead of doling out a failing grade.”

The school board says that “miscommunication” or “misinterpretation” is to blame for the apparent misunderstanding.

Evidently, separating learning from behaviour entails reporting separately whether students are capable of working independently, or well with others, or whether or not they waste class time.

In light of all the attention, Saskatchewan’s Education Minister Donna Harpauer announced yesterday that the province will be working with school boards to develop an anti-plagiarism and late marks policy. “The Ministry of Education has not directed school divisions to separate marks for behaviour from marks for learning outcomes,” the minister said.

-Photo by K. Sawyer

It’s not stealing, and saying that it is does more harm than good

In the academic world, articles like this one by Crawford Kilian that warn students away from plagiarism are ubiquitous. Some, like Kilian’s are quite well-written. And they’re all wrong.

Not wrong in precise detail, but wrong in the way they conceive the nature of plagiarism. Kilian, for example, reminds us that the etymology of the word links the crime to kidnapping, only now you’re “stealing ideas instead of people” and notes that “scholars don’t like seeing you plagiarize their work, just as retailers resent your shoplifting.” All this is not controversial and people say it all the time. Google “plagiarism is stealing” and you get 13 000 hits.

But plagiarism is not stealing, and saying that it is does more harm than good.

One problem with the “plagiarism is stealing” line is that it rings hollow, and rightly so. Normally when people steal things, they deprive the owner of the things they steal. If you steal my car, I don’t have my car anymore. But every undergraduate senses that if they copy text from Wikipedia and paste it into their essays, no one is deprived of anything. They’re not even depriving anyone of royalties.

Even worse, though, the stealing metaphor situates the bad behavior in the wrong place. Stealing is a crime against the rightful owner, but taking material from a book or a web site and turning it in as your own original work doesn’t harm the original author. Instead, the offence is an offence against your instructor, your course, your university, and academia in general. The problem with taking the work of another and passing it off as your own is not that you’ve taken the work of another, it’s that you’ve passed it off as your own.

Plagiarism, therefore, is not stealing. It’s counterfeiting.

Understanding plagiarism this way helps students see what is really at stake when it comes to their assignments. Counterfeiting, after all, is a serious crime, not because it steals money from the government, but because it represents fake money as though it were real. Governments rightly punish counterfeiters (in Canada it can land you in jail for six months) because to allow counterfeiting would be to undermine the entire monetary system. Your ten dollar bill only has value because it is presumed to be genuine. If everyone could just print their own money, it would cease to have value.

This is why university professors — good ones, anyway — are sticklers for plagiarism. Like money, credit in a course only has value if the student really worked to earn it. If everyone were just allowed to hand in anything, anyone could get a degree without doing any work and the degree itself would cease to have any value, and the whole system would fall apart. Medical schools couldn’t trust that potential physicians really understand chemistry. Law schools wouldn’t know whether their applicants could really write analytically. Would you hire a graduate of Cheat-As-Much-As-You-Want University? Would you want to have such a degree?

My point is not the plagiarism should be taken lightly. It’s very serious. My point is that for students to understand why it is serious, it has to be explained in a way that really gets to the heart of the matter. Kilian ends his essay by insisting that plagiarism “matters to us, so it better matter to you.” Fair enough: if students avoid cheating because they fear the consequences, I can live with that. But I would rather students avoided cheating because they realized that, in the long, run, they were hurting themselves, too.

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Students are caught unintentionally plagiarizing all the time. Learn how to stay safe

You’re writing a paper and you find yourself on the horns of a dilemma: if you make up facts that show the world as you think it ought to be, that’s fabrication and you’re guilty of academic misconduct. On the other hand, if you do your research and find the foremost expert on the subject and repeat whatever he says word-for-word, that’s plagiarism and it’s also academic misconduct.

Come on! It hardly seems fair!

Joking aside, plagiarism is easy to commit accidentally, it’s easy for professors to detect, and it can have serious repercussions. Ignorance is no defense against a charge of plagiarism; at this stage in your academic career, you are expected to know what plagiarism is and how to avoid it.

Plagiarism, in a nutshell, is when a student takes someone else’s idea or their way of expressing an idea and passes it off as their own. (This plagiarism stuff is making me nervous. I admit it: I paraphrased this definition from the University of Toronto’s Code of Behaviour on Academic Matters.)

To make things extra weird and complicated, you can also plagiarize yourself if you take things from papers you’ve previously submitted without citing them, because all academic works are supposed to be original.

Why would students plagiarize themselves, or anyone else, for that matter? Most plagiarism is committed accidentally, or out of ignorance.

“Usually it’s because they are not aware of correct citation practices so they don’t include quotation marks, they don’t cite their sources correctly,” says University of Western Ontario ombudsperson Adrienne Clarke.

Citation practices vary from subject to subject and from university to university. There are several styles of citation you may be expected to use, such as the MLA system and the APA system. It is your responsibility to learn the expectations of your professor and your department, and to follow them. Most universities have websites on plagiarism and citation, and if you’re still not certain, ask your professor.

Even if you are aware of expectations, it’s still easy to make mistakes if you’re not careful. Clark gives a scenario of how an honest student could land up plagiarizing a source:

“A student is working on a paper. They have notes in front of them, with citations and page numbers on sticky notes. They are organizing them, putting them down, moving them around. They are taking information from different places and jotting down page numbers and references. And then when it comes to putting the final paper together, there has been some careless note taking, or they have put their stickies in a different order, and written down wrong page numbers or gotten sources confused, so that their final citation list is not correct.”

Alex Gillis, a journalism professor at Ryerson University, has also seen mistakes made by students with chaotic notes. “Get organized so that later you don’t inadvertently plagiarize by thinking ‘That’s a great sentence I wrote’ when it’s actually from the Village Voice or something.”

Yes, improper citation, committed with the best of intentions but without much attention to detail, is plagiarism, and could be considered academic misconduct. When you’re taking notes, it’s important to keep your sources straight so you don’t attribute the wrong source, or worse, mistake a quotation you jotted down as an original idea of your own.

Next: What’s another way students accidentally plagiarize?

Repeat plagiarists and cheaters would get an “FD” grade, could lose their degree

The senate and board of governors of Simon Fraser University say they have approved “significant and extensive” changes to the school’s policies concerning dishonesty and student misconduct.

Included in the changes is a new mark – FD – which will indicate that a student was failed for reasons of academic dishonesty. This means that a plagiarized essay or serious case of cheating could follow students around throughout the rest of their academic careers.

“The FD grade will be available to department chairs who feel that a student’s behavior warrants a severe penalty, usually because they are repeat violators,” says Rob Gordon, director of the school’s criminology department. “A chair may also request the imposition of more severe penalties through the University Board on Student Discipline such as suspension and the rescinding of a degree.”

More: Don’t freakin’ plagiarize!

What should I do if I’m tempted to cheat?

The changes were the result of a university-wide, three-year investigation by Simon Fraser’s senate committee on academic integrity in student learning and evaluation, otherwise known as SCAISLE. The committee was struck in fall 2005 after a series of incidents concerning academic dishonesty were identified, and the school commissioned a report.

That report found that 63 per cent of faculty and 41 per cent of teaching assistants and tutor markers surveyed at Simon Fraser had ignored suspected cases of cheating. This included cases of falsifying lab data, “recycling” of labs, fabrication of bibliographies, extensive plagiarism in papers, homework copying, illegal group work, and copying on exams.

Calling the policy “a zero-tolerance approach both in theory and in practice,” Gordon says the school aimed to create a fair, consistent and effective new policy on matter concerning academic integrity. “We believe the combination of policies, procedures and strategies we’ve come up with will do that.”

As of May 1, the new policy includes a “Code of Academic Integrity and Good Conduct,” which includes a summary of expectations for students around issues of academic honesty and personal behaviour. This includes prohibitions against hazing, bullying, disclosing confidential information and possessing guns on campus.

“We now have a single student code of conduct that covers both academic integrity and good-conduct issues,” says Gordon. “And we’ve created a reporting system with a central record keeping mechanism so we can better detect multiple offenders across campuses and departments.”

With more than 50 per cent of students cheating, university degrees are losing their value. So why don’t the schools put a stop to it?

When General Motors realized last week that its Chevrolet Cobalt coupes lacked sufficient airbag padding, it recalled 98,000 cars. Hershey temporarily shut down an Ontario plant last November, recalling 25 types of candy because some may have been contaminated with salmonella. And when Sony found out its laptop batteries tended to overheat and catch fire, it recalled 9.6 million packs before launching a “global replacement program.” It’s common practice in the corporate world — standards must be met and guaranteed, or customers will lose faith in the product and the business will die. Less so in academia.

Universities are in the business of producing graduates — the doctors who will heal us, the engineers who will build our bridges and the CEOs who will generate our wealth. The degrees they confer are the university’s certificate that a graduate has completed a required course of study, and that he or she has been tested and deemed suitable by appropriate authorities. Yet a recent University of Guelph study has discovered that more than half the student body in Canada is cheating its way through school. And there is no recall. There is not even a great sense of urgency around the problem. The value of a degree is being debased, and there is mounting evidence that a lack of integrity in the university system will have a far-reaching effect on our economy in the years to come.

The numbers on academic misconduct at both Canadian and American post-secondary institutions are startling. The Guelph report puts the percentage of Canadian students engaging in serious cheating on written work at 53 per cent. In the U.S., according to some studies, 70 per cent of students admit to cheating in one form or another. Universities, apparently not convinced that cheating has reached crisis proportions, offer little but token anti-plagiarism policies and ineffective ethics campaigns to assuage critics. Professors, meanwhile, are not effective at policing their classrooms. In one U.S. survey, 44 per cent of profs said they had not reported a student caught cheating to officials during the three years prior to participating in the study.

When put into historical context, the numbers for academic integrity across North America show cheating is on a steady rise. The University of Guelph study, the first comprehensive investigation of cheating in Canadian institutions, was published last fall and found that 53 per cent of the undergraduates surveyed admitted to serious cheating on written work, including lifting passages from secondary sources or from the Internet without footnoting, and handing work completed by others in to instructors. According to numbers released to Maclean’s by the University of Toronto, instances of plagiarism rose from 92 a decade ago to 298 in the 2003-2004 school year.

U.S. research conducted by Donald L. McCabe, a business professor at Rutgers University in New Jersey, comparing students in 1963 and 1993, shows the percentage of those admitting to copying from a classmate doubled to 52 per cent; those reporting having helped another student cheat jumped to 37 per cent from 23 per cent; and that the use of crib notes in test and exam settings increased to over a quarter from 16 per cent.

The advent of the Internet has only accelerated the trend. While 10 per cent of U.S. students surveyed in 1999 confessed to yanking whole passages from the Web to write their papers, almost 40 per cent admitted to the practice six years later, according to McCabe’s research. Other Web-based services include the so-called “paper mills” hawking custom-made essays by ghostwriters with proven records for scoring high grades. The numbers attached to instances of Internet-related cheating — and indeed to cheating of all kinds — are likely under-reported. “What could be happening now is that it’s becoming so commonplace among students that it’s not cheating now — it’s just a way to survive the system,” says McCabe, who is also founding president of Duke University’s Center for Academic Integrity, which promotes ethics among students and faculty. “Stealing a glance at a test, a little bit of plagiarism — it’s just not on people’s radar screens anymore.”

Though cheating is rife in all fields of academic study, the highest numbers crop up in the scariest places. A survey of 5,300 U.S. graduate students published late last year by the Academy of Management Learning and Education, for example, found that business students, at 56 per cent, were the worst offenders — no comfort to prosecutors in the aftermaths of recent corporate corruption scandals. Engineering students, meanwhile, are, at 54 per cent, close behind those business students. Both groups admitted to activities ranging from plagiarism to smuggling crib notes into exams. Perhaps most shocking, some two dozen dental students at the University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey were last summer told to perform a year of community service after falsifying credits for clinical procedures such as root canals and cavity fillings — procedures patients would no doubt prefer their dentists had down cold. Such cases are not unique to the U.S. Over two dozen first-year University of Toronto law students were caught in 2001 fixing their grades on summer job applications in a bid to secure better jobs.

Though the more sanguine among us might argue that cheating has always been a part of university life, and that misconduct at university does not necessarily lead to misconduct later on, studies suggest that unethical students become misbehaving employees. “Cheating is the result of the desire to get ahead while taking shortcuts,” says Deborah Eerkes, director of the student judicial affairs office at the University of Alberta. “That’s what students are doing in classes if they’re cheating or plagiarizing — they’re trying to get the good grades without actually putting in the effort. And I think that underlying cause is what follows them.”

A 2005 New England Journal of Medicine paper suggests, for example, that doctors disciplined by state medical boards are three times more likely to have been singled out for unprofessional behaviour while at medical school. “The evidence is in,” read an editorial published alongside the article, “and the link between unprofessional behaviour in medical students and their subsequent unprofessional behaviour as physicians is undeniable.” Medical school students are not alone. A 2001 study of attitudes among business students published in the Journal of Education for Business found that those “who engage in dishonest behaviour in their college classes were more likely to engage in dishonest behaviour on the job.”

Though “we don’t have that great survey that says, if you cheat in college, you’re going to be the next Ken Lay [the former Enron CEO],” says Tim Dodd, executive director of Duke’s Centre for Academic Integrity, the potential consequences are clear. There is a cost to employers associated with hiring graduates whose university experiences have habituated them to cheating: it is the cost of incompetence. Writes Randi Sims, an authority in business ethics at Florida’s Huizenga School of Business and Entrepreneurship: “If some graduates are competing from professional positions based upon dishonestly earned academic credentials, employers may suffer.”

There is arguably no institution better positioned in today’s knowledge-based society to shape the minds of young people than the university. “The integrity of almost every major public institution has come under question in the last several years — whether it’s the police force, the government, the church, whatever,” says Julia Christensen Hughes, the Guelph professor who co-wrote the Canadian cheating study with McCabe. “Universities have to be beyond reproach. The credibility of the research that we generate, the credibility of the students who we graduate, has to be beyond questions.” And yet they are not.

On the face of it, at least, universities denounce academic misconduct and boast of policies that permit professors to ferret out and prosecute cheaters. In practice, students who cheat are unlikely to be caught and face few penalties when they are. Christensen Hughes, who is also director of Guelph’s Teaching Support Services, has heard it all — including stories of young women heading into end-of-term exams with crib notes scrawled on their upper thighs so they can hike up their skirts to expose historical dates, mathematical formulas and quotes from Shakespeare. She sees the problem as something deeper. “I think it’s reflective of a broader societal attitude in which character and integrity just don’t seem to matter as much as those characteristics did at one time.”

“If the worst that’s going to happen to them is they’re going to get docked some marks,” she adds, “from a student’s cost-benefit perspective, we’ve got to change that metric.” Many Canadian universities do not have a formalized way of detecting cheating in test settings, for example, where easy-to-manipulate multiple-choice exams have, in the age of the 300-student classroom, become ubiquitous — particularly in first- and second-year courses. Most policies governing the prosecution of plagiarists remain arbitrary and at the discretion of professors. And while professors at most institutions are encouraged to implement anti-cheating measures, they are frequently not mandatory.

The University of Toronto depends on a patchwork of exam standards and norms that varies from discipline to discipline. “Some departments do use several versions of tests when administering exams for large numbers of students,” says Pam Gravestock, the university’s associate director of the teaching advancement office. Alberta’s University of Lethbridge, meanwhile, doesn’t have an exam monitoring policy as formal as those used by some larger schools. “The use of randomized multiple-choice exams is fairly common but not mandated,” says vice-president academic, Séamus O’Shea. “I think most students are ethical, but there is no doubt that some are unaware of what plagiarism is, especially in the first and second years.” Penalties for both test cheating and plagiarism at Lethbridge range from the proverbial slap on the wrist to a failing grade to outright expulsion. “If you’re caught twice,” he says, “that’s grounds for a vacation — perhaps even a permanent one.”

Incoming University of British Columbia students, meanwhile, sign a contract binding them to the university’s “statutes, rules and regulations, and ordinances” under penalty of a failing grade and, on occasion, suspension. Paul G. Harrison, associate dean of science at UBC and a botany professor, says most instances of cheating involve multiple-choice questions, where, he says “a student looks at another student’s exam paper and copies what they can see or think they see.” Students entering an exam room are bound by the same university contract that restricts, among other things, “the use of any devices, including calculators, computers, sound or image players/recorders/transmitters(including telephones). . . other than those authorized by the examiners.” Banning such devices is now fairly standard at Canadian universities.

The students, perhaps not surprisingly, are hardly lining up to tackle the problem. Next week, Dalhousie University in Halifax kicks off “Academic Integrity Week,” aimed at promoting the intricacies of proper footnoting and attribution. Dalhousie administrators admit the bone-dry material is a hard sell. “The sign-up isn’t going very well,” says Lynn Taylor, head of Dal’s Centre for Learning and Teaching. “If we get 30 people [in a workshop] we’d be excited.”

Of all Canadian universities, perhaps McGill’s policies are the most stringent. It instituted mandatory assigned or scrambled seating and differing test versions for all their final exams in 1990, largely to curb cheating on multiple-choice questions. All final-year multiple-choice exams are subsequently run through McGill’s Exam Security Program, which analyzes wrong answers for telltale similarities. “The more identical wrong answers two or more exams have, the more it becomes suspect,” says David Harpp, a McGill chemistry professor who helped pioneer the program. “McGill is actually being quite conservative in its parameters. We could probably catch more cheats, but we are only catching the real idiots.” Despite the success of Harpp’s method, he knows of no other university in Canada that has adopted it.

McGill has used turnitin.com, a Web-based essay authentication database effective in identifying cases of plagiarism, since 2004. Though use of such databases is widespread at Canadian universities, only McGill has written it into its policy. If suspected of cheating, a student must either have the paper checked against the database or choose another means of authentication, as some student groups had copyright-related complaints about the database. Smaller class sizes, where students have been shown to cheat less, as well as boned-up exam monitoring, are McGill’s priorities. “The point isn’t to catch people,” says Morton Mendelson, deputy provost at McGill. “The point is to convince them that they’ll be caught if they cheat.”

Whatever the policies implemented by universities, cheating is still rampant and getting worse. It would be easy to blame students for their transgressions. Yet it is the universities — the institutions issuing the degrees and guaranteeing educational quality — that must find solutions. Perhaps professors, charged with monitoring their students, don’t make good cops. While instructors are “required to report academic dishonesty,” says Christensen Hughes, “some don’t.” That may understate the problem. While the Guelph study notes that 75 per cent of professors and 80 per cent of teaching assistants thought a student had cheated in the previous year — almost half were absolutely sure of it — less than half said they believed that cheating is a serious problem. In a 2001 paper, U.S. business professors Sarath Nonis and Cathy Owens Swift cited research indicating that while “60 per cent of faculty members observed cheating in their classrooms . . . only 20 per cent of them actually met with the student and a higher authority.” Says Nonis, who teaches marketing at Arkansas State University: “My gut feeling is that number might be even more now.”

A myriad of anxieties deter professors and teaching assistants from seeking formal punishment. The halls of academe are overrun with stories of TAs, confronted with plagiarism, doling out low marks rather than alerting university authorities — the rigmarole is just too unpleasant, oppressive and time-consuming. Professors are “there to teach and to publish research, not to police,” says Tina Kremmidas, assistant vice-president and senior economist at the Canadian Chamber of Commerce. “They’re competing too to get tenure, their salaries depend on it. So they are under severe pressure themselves. And if they had to monitor every student in their class for plagiarism and cheating, that’s extremely time-consuming.”

More often than not, too, academic integrity policies produce “confusion” among both students and faculty, says Christensen Hughes. “Maybe policies exist but don’t have the confidence of the people who are supposed to implement them,” she says. “They’ll make their own private deal with students or they can’t be bothered to use that formal process.” Such tacit collusion between students and teachers makes sense only in an environment where both camps harbour the perception that misconduct is endemic. “People in general think that everybody else is cheating, and that makes it okay for them to cheat too,” says Kremmidas. “It’s true of school, and it’s true of the corporate world.” The result is an uneven playing field — some classes fairer than others — a situation that in turn serves to reinforce the tendency among students to cheat in order to resolve that injustice.

Jack Mintz, a professor at the Rotman School of Management at the University of Toronto, believes underfunding at universities may be a reason why some professors, feeling overwhelmed by the workload and administratively powerless, turn a blind eye. Some instructors believe detecting a cheat reflects badly on them. “It could be that they worry about future endowments in some cases,” says Mintz. “The point is that the universities have to create a tone at the top that goes right down that this is not going to be tolerated.”

Experts say the reasons for cheating among today’s students extend from on-campus competition, to more fluid notions around what is unethical, to a cultural generation gap between students and professors. “In this knowledge-worker age, it’s now increasingly tied to doing well in school so you can get into better grad schools so you can get better jobs — so the pressure to do well is really high,” says Stephen Covey, author of The Speed of Trust. “There’s strong data that within companies the No. 1 reason for ethical violations is the pressure to meet expectations, sometimes unrealistic expectations.” The same, he says, holds true for school. Over the last two decades, too, North American universities have seen their mandates shift from institutions of learning, remote from the more quotidian aims of finding work and putting food on the table, to the necessary condition for entree into the corporate world. “I think there’s a lot of students these days who have bought into the message that you come to university for a credential — to get a better job, to make more money,” says Christensen Hughes. As Covey says, students “get the degree, not the education.”

Some students who admit to misconduct often believe their professors are complicit in their cheating. Among engineering students, says Christensen Hughes, “there was a sense that they were expected to take more courses than other students, typically, so they felt justified — they needed to find shortcuts.” She adds: “They also said that they assumed that faculty knew that. So in a sense they felt there was collusion or, ‘Nudge-nudge, wink-wink, we all know what’s going on, we all know what it takes to survive this program.’ ”

McCabe sees something else at work in the trend. “Younger people joining the workforce feel much more at ease making their own rules — deciding what rules they can ignore, what rules they should apply and what way they can apply them,” he says. In a small but not insignificant number of the students surveyed, McCabe finds some who see cheating as a valuable skill in itself. “I’ll have students who will say, ‘I’m just acquiring a skill that will serve me well in the real world,’ ” says McCabe. “They see it as training in a sense — they’re learning how to beat the system.”

This, of course, is a breed of rationalization. Professors are not complicit and cheating is not a domain of study. “The more people rationalize cheating, the more it becomes a culture of dishonesty,” says Covey. “And that can become a vicious, downward cycle. Because suddenly, if everyone else is cheating, you feel a need to cheat too.” Nothing demonstrates this better than the group of American business students who, presented with the idea that F grades would be accompanied by permanent black marks in their records if the failure was due to cheating, embraced the notion. “They wanted employers to know that they’d failed the course because they cheated and not because they were necessarily stupid,” says Christensen Hughes.

Having cheated their way to degrees, these new grads will likely enter the workforce without the “skills and the knowledge base to do what they were hired to do,” warns Kremmidas, who says that employers will suffer the consequences: “This raises little red flags as to the productivity of the individual.” Tasks take longer to complete than they should because the new hire must figure out the assignment or be taught by colleagues and management, who have their own work to do. Employees who aren’t cut out for the job could also put their companies at risk of lawsuits launched by angry and injured customers or unsatisfied clients.

Faced with mounting pressure to do work they’re incapable of accomplishing, some new hires will resort to their former cheating ways, says Mintz: “There is a certain morality involved. If you’re going to cheat to get ahead in school, then it makes sense that it is something you might do later on.” According to a 2006 report on workplace abuses by the American Association of Certified Fraud Examiners, employee cheating costs companies a median of US$159,000 a year, and the most common infractions at small businesses include writing fake cheques, “skimming” revenues and processing false invoices. Fraud cost Canadian companies US$65 billion last year, Kremmidas extrapolates from the report.

Employers who fire a cheating worker incur more expenses: replacing a mid-level employee costs a company US$10,000, and US$40,000 to hire a new senior executive, according to estimates by the trade publication Recruiting Times. But keeping that cheating employee on staff can cost a company even more. Thirty per cent of all business failures are due to employee theft, according to the U.S. Department of Commerce. The risk of going bankrupt because of cheating employees is enough to break trust between staff and management. “And there’s an economic consequence to that,” says Covey. “Everything will take longer and cost more because now you’re validating, questioning, wondering, and you’re putting in place redundancies to check on people because you don’t trust them.”

Covey warns employers to think twice about giving cheating students the benefit of the doubt when looking for new recruits. “If companies are hiring people who are fundamentally not honest, but have rationalized their dishonesty and they’re cheating, then [companies] are going to be dealing with fraud. This is not just a moral issue. There’s an extraordinary cost to it.”

That cost is particularly troubling when applied to the majority of companies, which will suffer the same negative effects of workplace fraud. “When you start seeing that over half of students cheat, it’s a very big concern because that then starts sounding like it could have an impact on the overall productivity of the economy,” and not just on individual businesses, says Mintz. Productivity determines economic growth, adds Kremmidas, and losses would affect standards of living and employee wages.

Covey foresees more scandals like Enron and WorldCom as cheating becomes more acceptable to society. “We will see a crisis and a lack of integrity,” he says. And that will provoke more compliance laws such as Sarbanes Oxley in the U.S. and Bill 198 in Canada, both passed in the wake of corporate crimes, which companies must now follow to ensure their honesty in reporting financial information. “So the response is to try and legislate morality and integrity. And you become a rule-based society,” says Covey.

But even legislation can’t guarantee trust. “If the cheating is widespread, then all the laws won’t even stop people. And really you would see a collapse in society,” insists Covey, adding: “Trust is central to an economy that works.”

A lack of trust is a direct threat to society, argues Duke’s Tim Dodd. “We operate almost unconsciously in a world of assumed trust,” he says. “When I drive over a bridge, I don’t think about whether or not the engineer was properly credentialed or whether the inspector took a bribe. I trust it’s not going to collapse. I trust that when I walk under a chandelier hanging in a hotel ballroom in New York that [it was hung] according to specification by a person of competence and that the inspection was done by a person of integrity. We couldn’t live as a species without that level of trust because we wouldn’t be able to put one foot in front of the other.”

Imagine putting one foot in front of the other and falling into an abyss. Bad bridge-building, like a bad education, compromises a public trust. Certainly universities owe a duty to the companies that rely on their product — the graduates who arrive each year as interns and articling students. “This raises an interesting question: should employers start thinking of suing universities, if they can prove this, for producing a student who actually cheated his way through university?” asks Mintz. “I think there actually may be a case for that.”

But what of the university’s responsibility to the public? “Professionals are expected to be in positions of trust,” says Len Brooks, a professor at the University of Toronto’s Rotman School of Management. “They have expertise that people who rely upon them do not. The professional is expected to demonstrate fiduciary responsibility — fiduciary duty — toward the client or public.” Universities — home to the teachers who produce our healers, our bridge-builders and the CEOs who generate our wealth — are failing to demonstrate that responsibility by permitting widespread cheating among students. And we will all pay.