Cheating at Pitt not widespread

College students are prone to goofing up. Sometimes a student may forget to work on a paper… College students are prone to goofing up. Sometimes a student may forget to work on a paper or study for a test and decide to resort to cheating. And sometimes, that student gets caught.

Plagiarism and cheating does happen in Pitt classes, but rarely is it severe enough to suspend or expel a student.

Frederick Whelan, assistant dean of Undergraduate Studies, said that only one or two plagiarism or cheating cases per year have to face the University’s Academic Integrity Hearing Board. This is the board that hears and decides on issues such as plagiarism upon a student or faculty appeal.

Otherwise, if a student is caught cheating or plagiarizing in class, the professor and student usually agree one-on-one about the consequences, whether it be failing the student for the assignment or for the entire course.

If the student and the professor cannot reach an agreement and a student appeals, the case may involve the assistant dean of Undergraduate Studies, or even the Academic Integrity Hearing Board. Records are kept of these cases, and repeat offenders face suspension or expulsion.

“Years go by when no cases get appealed. Most cheating is plagiarism cases. There usually isn’t too much ambiguity,” Whelan said about the issue at Pitt.

However, in large classes that do not require written assignments and rely only on tests, students can find ways to avoid being caught cheating.

Mark Strauss, a psychology professor, tries to minimize the chance of students looking off of each other’s tests and using cell phones with text messaging by patrolling the aisles of his Intro to Psychology classroom during exam days.

“What worries me now is all of the electronics; there are a lot more ways to cheat. You want to maintain a classroom as a place where people want to learn and not as a police state. But it does worry me,” Strauss said. “I know we’re missing a vast majority of it.”

In addition to getting help on tests, students also find ways to cheat on essays and homework. While some professors at Pitt do encourage “collaboration” between students on take-home assignments, plagiarism happens when a student tries to pass off someone else’s work as his or her own.

Nicholas Coles, an English professor, said that plagiarism is punishable when it is done with the intention to deceive.

“You have to be open to the possibility that a student did not know what he or she is doing,” he said. “Our policies give students the benefit of the doubt.”

While juniors Megan Sewak and Mandy Erway regularly study and work on homework together, they agree that they wouldn’t intentionally plagiarize on a formal paper.

But if a professor is easy or if a student has an extremely competitive major, someone could be motivated to cheat, said Erway.

When a student does decide to plagiarize and buy a paper online or copy sentences off of the Internet, professors have the tools necessary to catch the culprit.

TurnItIn.com, a plagiarism-detection computer program, is free to all professors at Pitt. With the program, a professor can submit a student’s paper and then have the program scan it and compare it to its database. All previously published passages and potentially paraphrased ideas in the paper are flagged by the computer.

The professor then can see the paper’s percentage of the likelihood of plagiarism.

“I cite everything really well,” said senior Amanda Natalie of her precautions against being flagged as a plagiarizer. “You have to quote a lot of stuff to support your findings anyway.”

In general, professors state their personal guidelines for academic integrity on syllabi or at the beginning of a course and then hope for the best.

“For the most part, Pitt undergraduates seem fairly honest,” Coles said about his students, and Natalie agreed.

“I don’t really know a lot of people who are slackers,” she said.

While the lack of cheating cases brought before Whelan and the Academic Integrity Hearing Board may be evidence of an honest student body, the act of cheating reflects not only a lapse of judgment, but also morality.

Psychology professor Barbara Kucinski stresses this.

“There’s not much we can do to prevent or minimize it. Hopefully students will have enough morality and integrity to not do it,” she said. “All you have is your own integrity. If people can’t trust you, I can’t imagine how people can get through their lives.”