Do the Right Thing
Plagiarism Lurks Onto Columbia's Campus
It’s November 2002. Bryan Laulicht, a CC senior, enters the private room he requested at the Sylvan Learning Center in Garden City, NY to take his GRE. Once inside, he places an electronic device onto the computer used for the exam. Outside, in a van parked near the building, sits Sasha Bakhru, a SEAS senior. He is surrounded by $12,000 worth of high-tech equipment, receiving images of test questions on a laptop computer able to receive wireless transmissions. He takes photos with a digital camera of the images as a backup. If everything goes according to plan, both boys will be getting full marks on the GRE.
It may sound like the opening scene of a cinematic thriller, but sometimes academia is stranger than fiction. In November 2002, Spectator—along with other major media outlets like the New York Times and Newsday—reported that Columbia seniors Bakhru and Laulicht were caught in an attempt to duplicate the GRE when the walkie-talkies they were using malfunctioned. The pair allegedly wanted to get a perfect score in order to get scholarships for grad school.
Most students don’t employ such high-tech schemes to receive high marks, but that doesn’t mean Columbia hasn’t had its share of intracollegiate scandal when students need that A. In the 2004-05 school year, students on Carman 6 were caught exchanging problem set answers for Frontiers of Science. And most recently, the Graduate School of Journalism made the wrong kind of news last December when allegations of cheating came out regarding a 90-minute open-book, take-home ethics test in Samuel Freedman’s pass/fail class, Critical Issues in Journalism.
There have always been students willing to cut academic corners: copying a friend’s homework, handing in an essay written by another student, or writing formulae on the insides of gum wrappers belong to a manner of techniques both clever and obvious.
Society frowns upon cheating on taxes, lovers, and board games, but it’s especially taboo in academics. Lately, however, the subject is getting more complicated. It’s safe to say that the average college student has the world at his or her fingertips. The Internet provides access to millions of academic essays, study guides, newspaper articles, and encyclopedias. Before the Internet, aspiring plagiarists had to go to the library, photocopy a page from a book, and transcribe it to the paper. Today, it’s a simple copy and paste job.
But ease alone can’t entirely explain the drive to cheat—the drive to match or surpass the financial success of friends and family provides an additional incentive. And in a high pressure Ivy League university, it’s not surprising that cheating at Columbia remains a problem year after year.
“Everything is more competitive in today’s economy,” says David Callahan, author of The Cheating Culture: Why More Americans Are Doing Wrong to Get Ahead. “It’s not enough to just have a B.A. these days. You need to have an advanced degree often if you’re going to succeed in the world. And I think that both undergraduate and graduate students are under more pressure, susceptible to more anxiety about succeeding these days.”
There is the additional pressure students place on themselves to achieve lofty goals, to be a top student in a top school, and land a top job after graduation. Some say that this increased competition is what causes students to make mistakes, while others claim that with more technology, the definition of cheating has become ambiguous. Though this may be true, it is certain that most students know what cheating is, which begs the question: why would a Columbia student with a bright future risk it all for a single grade?
After two sentences of an essay she handed in late were discovered to be from Spark Notes, Corrina Brown, CC ’09, whose name has been changed by request because of privacy concerns, is now waiting for an e-mail.
“He [the professor] reported it to the disciplinary head and [now] they’ll contact me and I’ll probably have a hearing. I talked to my dean and he said that ... I’m probably going to be marked guilty and that they’ll probably put me on probation or something,” Brown says.
If she’s found guilty of cheating, her chances of getting into the law school of her dreams may be affected. Columbia College’s Dean’s Discipline policy clearly states what are considered as academic violations: “plagiarism (copying word for word or paraphrasing without proper citation or acknowledgment from a written or electronic source), cheating on examinations, collaborating on assignment without the instructor’s permission, receiving unauthorized assistance on an assignment, copying computer programs, forgery, submitting work for one course that already has been used for another course, selling of notes, exams, papers, etc., lying to a professor or university officer, obtaining advanced knowledge of exams or other assignments without permission. Possible punishments run the gamut from a warning to expulsion.”
The Office of Student Affairs at Columbia College declined to release details about the number of students who are disciplined for cheating each year.
“There’s nothing I can do,” Brown says shakily, with frustration registering on her face. “I talked to the office of pre-professional advising and they said that getting into a graduate school such as law school would be ‘not impossible’ ... you work your entire life and then you make one mistake without even realizing and now your entire life can be blown away and ... there goes your future.”
Brown, a hard worker, has spent years planning out her career plans, proving that even the most diligent of students can slip.
“You have that combination of some people succeeding extremely well and most people being under a lot of pressure, feeling a lot of anxiety about being successful, and I think that provides incentives and rationalizations for cheating,” Callahan says. “As the economic divide between the winners and everybody else gets bigger, people will take more risks and compromise their integrity to be on the right side of that divide.”
Columbia is not the only Ivy to recently garner bad publicity for dishonest students. Last spring, it seemed like everyone was talking about that Harvard girl whose life plunged from an 18-year-old with a book deal to the center of a media scandal. Academics and non-academics alike expressed disbelief, outrage, and I-saw-it-coming non-surprise when parts of then-first year Harvard student Kaavya Viswanathan’s first novel, How Opal Mehta Got Kissed, Got Wild and Got a Life, were found to have been “borrowed” from various novels by authors including Megan McCafferty, Meg Cabot, and even Salman Rushdie. “Any phrasing similarities between her [McCafferty’s] works and mine were completely unintentional and unconscious,” Viswanathan said in a publisher-released statement last April 24, a day after the Harvard Crimson published an article citing examples of similarities. The evidence of plagiarism was almost indisputable.
Although both Brown and Viswanathan insist that their cheating was unconscious and unintentional, David Callahan still sees this plagiarism as a product of today’s youth-indulgent society. “It’s hard to know what someone like her [Viswanathan] is thinking,” he says. “But it is clear that if we didn’t live at a moment in history where, you know, college freshmen were getting six-figure book advances, there’d probably be fewer 18-year-olds willing to cut corners in order to making that big money.”
David Helfand, chair of the astronomy department and co-chair of Frontiers of Science, also sees a money-oriented society as a reason for cheating. Students have often complained about Frontiers assignments, and currently the Columbia College Student Council is seeking ways to reform the structure of the class partially in order to mitigate the rampant copying of problem sets. Three years ago, a number of students on Carman 6 were found cheating on their assignments.
“People would go around the dorms with baskets putting in problem sets, then there were 30 of them with their laptops downloading answers to various problems, deciding which were the best ones and distributing them around the campus,” Helfand says. “I think the culture from which many students come is a deeply anti-intellectual culture that views education as a series of hurdles which are supposed to get you over one thing to another and are supposed to end you up with some seven-figure salary, the obsession of most people, and therefore however you get over those hurdles is fine.”
“I think the general decline of ethics in business and in politics and in journalism and other public professions has not helped the situation because it appears that people get ahead in the world by cheating ... students are sometimes perplexed by the reactions of their college professors, which can be just violent anger and just fury ... and they’re perplexed by this because there are few other professions in which the truth matters so much, particularly in science.”
But Helfand suggests that students might not know the various definitions of cheating and blames it on the trend of students more skilled at memorizing and regurgitating rather than thinking. “The thing I find disturbing about many students today is that they don’t distinguish the process of thinking from the process of typing into the upper right hand corner of their browser where it says Google,” he says. “And this was best exemplified ... [by] a student here last year ... and she said, ‘But Professor Helfand, you have to understand, I Google your problems and nothing comes back!’ And I said, ‘That’s why I call them problems. You have to think about them.’”
Helfand cites high school teaching techniques as a probable cause. “High schools today ... seem to encourage the use of the Internet, which is a valuable tool but ... that’s not solving problems, that’s looking up information.”
The use of the Internet as a learning and research tool has opened up a whole new set of rules that students can easily overlook, or simply ignore. And by overlooking these rules, students like Brown become cheaters. Often, the instances that lead up to so-called subconscious plagiarism are familiar. In Brown’s case, “there was a final paper that was due at the time of the final ... and I procrastinated. So I finished the final and I hadn’t started my essay yet and when I told him [my professor] that I wasn’t done she said, ‘Okay, well, e-mail it to me by seven o’clock tonight.’ That gave me approximately four hours to write the essay and so I was just going crazy, and I didn’t know what to do so I was just researching information about Plato’s Apology online. I had the majority of my essay written out but I was also reading things online. Three hours later and I had stuff on my computer but I was really worried because I only had an hour left and my essay was completely incomplete. I was reading stuff and, well, SparkNotes came up with an amazing idea ... so I used it [the idea] in my paper and I didn’t realize that I’d been quoting SparkNotes but I was just like rushing through the essay just typing whatever came out of my mind.”
“It’s obvious plagiarism ... there’s proof that it is plagiarism,” Brown continues. “The thing is I never intentionally wanted to take someone else’s idea and say that it was mine because the entire essay was mine besides the last part.” Brown points out that the professor asked her to hand in whatever she had at the time and that the essay was not actually complete and had not undergone any revision. When the professor noticed the uncited section from SparkNotes, Brown received a failing grade on the essay and a C in the class.
Depending on their high school background, students may honestly not know how to quote texts, but there’s also a chance that they are running to the Internet for answers because they can use—or abuse—it with few repercussions. At Barnard, professors are trying to change that.
Barnard uses turnitin.com, an online service used to detect plagiarism. “We subscribe to turnitin.com primarily so that faculty members don’t have to spend so much time looking at various sources trying to find out whether a paper has been plagiarized,” says Karen Blank, dean of studies at Barnard College. “That way we save the faculty members some time ... so that if they suspect that a paper may have been taken from a Web site or journal that’s on the Web then they can give the paper to us and we can scan it and determine whether it has been taken from the Web.”
According to turnitin.com, “Every paper submitted is returned in the form of a customized Originality Report. Results are based on exhaustive searches of billions of pages from both current and archived instances of the Internet, millions of student papers previously submitted to Turnitin, and commercial databases of journal articles and periodicals.” So if you’ve done your own work and research, then only the cited quotes in your paper should come back highlighted. But if your paper comes back lit up like College Walk in the winter, well, you’ll have some explaining to do.
Barnard, unlike Columbia, has an Honor Code that clarifies the Honor Process carried out by the Honor Board when a student is found cheating. During orientation, each student receives the Honor Code booklet along with A User’s Guide to Resources for Writing at Barnard College.
In addition, savvy to the fact that students don’t read the myriad of booklets handed to them during orientation, Barnard faculty and the Honor Board—made up of Blank, three faculty members, and eight students—take extra pains to inform students about plagiarism and its ramifications. Junior Class Dean James Runsdorf and Director of First-Year English Margaret Vandenburg both make presentations to new students. “Ignorance about plagiarism would not be an excuse,” Blank says.
Dean of Academic Affairs for Columbia College Kathryn Yatrakis agrees, though she said she recognizes that sometimes there are gray areas, like group work and reusing papers. This appears less often in SEAS, she notes, because the nature of assignments is much more quantitative and concrete.
“A result came up on a national survey where students did not think it was cheating if you handed in the same paper for different classes and for faculty,” she says. “We think that’s ridiculous, we wouldn’t even think to say that but students say, ‘Well, I did the paper, no one told me not to do this.’”
The practice, sometimes referred to as self-plagiarism, is a serious offense of which not all students seem to be aware. And self-plagiarism extends beyond critical papers. The Undergraduate Writing Department has rules in place to prevent students from submitting the same story or poem repeatedly through their various workshops instead of creating new writing each term. The current Creative Writing Course Outlines pamphlet states, “Self-plagiarism is prohibited by the university and constitutes academic dishonesty. This means you are never permitted to submit the same work for any two classes. Any student who wishes to continue working on a project begun in another class may do so only with the specific permission of the instructor with whom they wish to study.”
Despite potential misunderstandings, Yatrakis says, “I think faculty and we at academic affairs know what cheating is and ... we think that students, for the most part, know what cheating is.”
Helfand also suggests that current students, who have grown up with the Internet, are so used to looking up answers that plagiarism doesn’t seem as serious to them as it should.
“At Barnard, a faculty member always has complete authority for a grade. And our sanctions are warning, probation, suspension, expulsion. Very rarely, frankly, is a sanction a warning because we do expect students to have an understanding of what plagiarism or other kinds of dishonesty is,” explains Blank. “I hope that the honor code, and references to it ... reminds us of the value of academic integrity.”
Yatrakis says that the College plans to be more aggressive in increasing awareness. Two years ago, around the same time as the Carman 6 incident, the Academic Affairs Office helped to create a faculty statement specifically detailing the school’s position on cheating and academic integrity. There are also other plans.
“One thing we’re thinking about is having first-years who register complete an interactive program to make sure that they understand what is meant by cheating, what is not meant by cheating, what’s expected of them, what’s expected of faculty, to make sure they know,” she says. “[Also] starting at the end of this term, if not next year, we want to alert the community what has happened to students who have been found guilty, like ‘X number of students have been given a warning, Y number of students have been expelled, and Z have been suspended.’” She mentions that students have expressed confusion about what really happens when someone gets caught, so the extra information may be effective.
“Frankly, though, we know it goes on in high school and if you’re used to doing business this way, it’s going to be difficult to change so we need to make it difficult,” she adds.
At the end of the day, however, cheating incidents only get to the dean’s office if the professor chooses to report it. Giving faculty complete control of punishment can cause a disparity in the severity of punishment for the same offense. “I know people that copied off each other and their punishment was that they got C’s for the essay and that was it, no hearing,” Brown says.
Yatrakis is aware of the inconsistency within the University with regards to punishment, but trusts that proper judgment will be exercised.
“In any human system like this, there are going to be differences, not necessarily unfair differences ... we might agree that a first-year student in his first semester who has just found out that there’s a family emergency or who is ill didn’t have enough time to prepare for a paper and included in that paper were some sites that were not referenced is in a different situation from the senior who has been disciplined already for cheating and who again plagiarized a portion of a paper. The offense might be the same, but I could make the case that this is really a different educational process here. It is not standard, but we wouldn’t expect it to be nor do we want it to be,” she says.
Helfand, meanwhile, suggests shifting some of the onus of clearly delineating what is and is not plagiarism onto the professors themselves: “I think it’s incumbent upon every faculty member to be very explicit the first day of class and in their syllabus to define what they expect in terms of collaboration and what they expect in terms of single work.”
The fact that Columbia’s schools are bringing the subject of plagiarism to the forefront with tutorials, presentations, and honor codes to inform students of the repercussions, may very well be effective. Increased awareness of cheating does not, however, remove the pressures of the competitive career world.
“It’s not just having the brand name as an undergrad. It’s also being able to get into the right graduate school or the right professional school or get the right entry-level jobs. Even an Ivy League degree is no guarantee of success these days. And it’s no guarantee against economic insecurity, and you know, people know that,” Callahan says.
“At the same time, of course, the culture has gotten a lot more focused on money and material possessions and is getting more status-conscious and materialistic ... so there’s a greater focus on making money and a greater rationalization of doing whatever it takes to make that money.”
“Frankly, it is something that is so upsetting to faculty ... it really shoots at the very foundation of the academic institution,” Yatrakis says. “Get the B, get the C, get the lower grade ... it will carry that personal integrity, which will serve you for the rest of your life.”
But in the academic world, cheating is like placing yourself in an iron maiden, which might seem like an option since society places that A, that J.D., or that Ph.D. on a pedestal of Olympic proportions. So, while a cutthroat society is providing incentive for students to cheat, universities need to make sure they put the repercussions in the foreground. Only then can the truly innocent avoid sloppy mistakes that endanger their academic careers, while those willing to steal test answers and copy problem sets can be punished without the question of whether or not they actually knew they were cheating.
—Additional reporting by Liz Brown and Sadia Latifi