Students at Fort Lewis College say cheating – whether it’s plagiarism or sharing answers on an exam – occurs with some regularity.
Jandrea Fevold, accounting student in the School of Business, said the school has not taken allegations seriously in the past when she called out two accounting classmates. She says they routinely cheat.
“It’s not fair to the other students, and it taints the whole program,” Fevold said. “Our profession is based upon ethics and integrity, but people would rather just stay out of each other’s business. Nowadays, people are judged off their GPA. But how real is that GPA? How honest?”
In a day and age when the job market is tougher, the pressure is higher to maintain good grades and a bachelor’s degree is considered the bare minimum, students cheat for a variety of reasons. Analyses on college students across the nation point to a range of motives for cheating and make connections to everything from the standard pressure to be successful or laziness to self-esteem issues, moral values and, as the dean and director of student conduct and conflict resolution at the University of Florida suggests, because students aren’t sufficiently prepared in high school.
According to a study conducted by a Rutgers University professor, 36 percent of almost 64,000 polled undergraduates in the U.S. admitted to copying or paraphrasing sentences from the Internet without sourcing the work. Other analyses, like one published in 2009 in The Journal of Educators Online, notes the growing ease of cheating in the digital age.
Ken Pepion is the associate vice president for Academic Affairs and the provost’s designee for handling academic dishonesty allegations at FLC. He said it is at professors’ discretion how to handle cases of plagiarism or cheating. In most cases, students will admit to cheating, in which case they receive a failing grade for that exam or assignment.
When that happens, students appear before Pepion, who explains school policy and possible consequences.
“Provided there are no further incidents of it, that’s the end of the case,” Pepion said. If students persist in cheating, they face a hearing before the Academic Standards Committee, which can suspend students and permanently mark their transcripts. The committee can also, in rare instances, dismiss the charges.
But how often do allegations actually make it out of the classroom? Both on a national scale and at particular colleges, it’s difficult to accurately quantify the matter beyond what students admit to and what is reported. At FLC, the average number of cases that come before Pepion is consistently about five per semester, with an uptick as mid-terms and finals approach. Most of those claims involve cutting and pasting forms of plagiarism.
But Zach Schult, a business major and FLC sophomore, said he sees cheating, in certain forms, happening daily at school.
“There’s definitely a lot of helping each other on quizzes and copying homework,” he said. “Plagiarism, not so much.”
Has he himself cheated? “Yes.”
The Durango Herald asked FLC professors for their perceptions of the school’s cheating climate. Ryan Haaland, professor of physics and engineering, said the campus has strict policies, but there is “a general feeling that we would like (the policies) to have stronger teeth.”
More specifically, he would like to see a campus-wide discussion about how to address the issue.
“On one end is stress and the desire to get that grade that leads to a scholarship or job. The other end is laziness: ‘I didn’t prepare, so how am I going to cover my ass?’” said Haaland, who has been an educator for about 30 years.
Speaking to his own department, however, Haaland said the pass rate for last year’s engineering students on the national exam was 15 of 16 on the first attempt. Given the rigor of both the exam and the monitoring of it, Haaland believes in the integrity of that pass rate.
“That’s extraordinarily good, which implies to me if students were rampantly cheating, they would not be prepared for that.”
Most students interviewed for this story said they know of, have witnessed or they themselves have partaken in cheating in some manner. Students agreed that cheating in the form of plagiarism is not the most common problem, but sharing homework or looking up test answers is.
“I see it happen mostly on busy work and homework,” political science major Zaq McDaniel said, adding that he had cheated in high school but not college.
International business major Matt Tomaselli said it also depends on how much value the student places on the work.
“It kind of depends on the class and just whether they take it seriously.”
