Despite a major modernization of Sacramento State’s academic honesty policy seven years ago, records show many of the issues faculty leaders intended to fix remain problems today, and some of the revisions have simply been ignored.

The policy revision, which pushed for greater transparency and clarity in academic honesty cases, contained a requirement Student Affairs issue reports about the number and type of academic dishonesty cases. Their outcomes were never implemented, officials said. Even today, tension remains between advocates of transparency and Student Affairs officials, and students, who are subject to the policy and have little ability to determine its content or participate in its enforcement.

Modernization of the policy

A professor was upset enough with Student Affairs’ handling of a case of academic dishonesty in May 2002 to complain to the Faculty Senate’s Academic Standards Committee, which has jurisdiction over the academic honesty policy.

“The academic dishonesty was reported by the instructor and it just seemed to drop off the map,” said Tom Krabacher, a geography professor and chair of the Academic Standards Committee at the time. “It was impossible to tell if there was any follow through or if any action was taken. As a consequence, there was a real frustration over that.”

The complaints prompted the committee to make significant changes to the policy. Committee members said they thought the old policy was unclear and vague and becoming increasingly outdated. The document, only a page long, had not been updated since 1990.

Because the policy did not explicitly outline any form of process for addressing cases of plagiarism, it left individual academic departments free to implement their own academic honesty policies so long as they were not inconsistent with the university’s policy. Departments could keep their own files of students who had cheated in their department’s courses in the past and consult these as needed.

While some professors liked this system because it allowed them to access the files themselves when they suspected one of their students of cheating, the university began to frown on the practice, believing having those records could expose the university to a lawsuit, said Scott Gordon, a computer science professor who served on a working group for the committee. If access to the records was not properly controlled, or if disparaging information about a student leaked out, the university could be accused of libel, Gordon said.

It also made it difficult to determine if a student had cheated multiple times in different departments, since there was no requirement that information be shared with Student Affairs. Also, with departments functioning more autonomously, there was no guarantee their procedures for evaluating a claim made against a student would be consistent.

Only Student Affairs could impose academic punishments on a student, like suspension, expulsion, a formal warning or other actions – and cases which never made it there could not be evaluated by Student Affairs officials to see whether such action was warranted.

Lack of disclosure

The Academic Standards Committee inserted a provision in 2004 requiring the vice president for Student Affairs to “submit to the Faculty Senate and the Associated Students, Inc. (ASI) annually, a statistical report of the number and type of cases of academic (sic) and the actions taken. This report shall reflect the reports submitted by faculty in the discharge of their responsibility as specified in section IV.B above.”

The rule made it into the final version of the policy, and is still in effect today. But in the seven years since the policy was enacted, ASI and the Faculty Senate have never received a single report containing information about academic dishonesty cases.

Leonard Valdez, director of student conduct, said no one had ever told him to produce those kinds of reports since he was promoted to his position in 2005, and he could not recall Student Affairs ever providing that information.

Valdez questioned why those statistics would be necessary.

“It’s not clear to me why anyone would want a general report on plagiarism given they vary so greatly in what’s involved with them,” Valdez said, arguing the amount of cases could vary significantly between years, making it hard to establish a pattern.

When asked about the lack of reports, Vice President of Student Affairs Lori Varlotta said the policy was being rewritten again and it did not make sense to begin compiling the reports at this time.

Kristin Van Gaasbeck, economics professor and chair of the Academic Policies Committee, said the committee was making revisions to the student rights and responsibilities policy in order to remove outdated language and sections duplicated from other policies, but was not changing the academic honesty policy.

“That policy, as you see it online and in the policy manual, we’re not recommending any changes to that,” Van Gaasbeck said.

Varlotta said the policy existed before she became vice president and reports had never been produced by anyone in the department.

Before her 2004 promotion, Varlotta worked as associate vice president of Student Affairs under Shirley Uplinger, the former vice president, who retired in 2004. Records show both attended Academic Policies Committee meetings where this policy was discussed. Varlotta stressed no one had ever asked the reports to be produced.

“I don’t think a lot of students would want this information, even at the aggregate level, to be disseminated,” Varlotta said.

Even internally, Student Affairs does not compile any information about the amount of cases it processes, Valdez said. Information on students exists in paper files administrators must look through by hand if they need to view them to aid in an investigation, but no one tallies the number of files in a given year in an attempt to create a set of data.

Student Affairs uses a computerized tracking system called PAVE, but Valdez said he finds it unreliable and seldom uses it. He said the system does a poor job of allowing him to distinguish between different students with the same first and last name.

“It’s not to a point where I’m confident we can give accurate data,” Valdez said.

Valdez said he considers his job more about educating students on how to avoid committing academic dishonesty instead of policing or punishing students who have cheated. Valdez’s predecessor, John Morris, had the title of student judicial officer, which is now referred to as student conduct director. (Morris is now an assistant athletic director at the University of Washington). This reflects a national shift toward trying to make proceedings with students less confrontational, Valdez said.

“We don’t really want to engage students in a process where we’re combatants,” Valdez said. “We’d like to sit down and talk to you about where the mistake is or how you avoid mistakes and then guide the behavior on that basis.”

He said, however, he would still take punitive action if necessary, but his first priority was to help students understand that their actions were wrong and what could be done differently in the future.

One of the original reasons why the policy was rewritten was some professors felt uncomfortable that when they did refer students to Student Affairs, it was impossible to determine what, or whether, action was being taken against them, documents show.

Because there was no centralized reporting, there was no clear way to track instances of academic dishonesty on campus or to evaluate the effectiveness of existing programs that fight it.

Because disclosure was spurned in favor of practices reducing the amount of data available, information is unavailable to the public – or to faculty – to evaluate whether existing academic dishonesty procedures are effective.

As a result, little hard data exists on academic honesty enforcement at Sac State, and attempting to gather it can be difficult.

When research librarian Ben Amata wanted to do a study on plagiarism at Sac State in Oct. 2003, he turned to the Faculty Senate, which referred the matter to Academic Affairs. He said he envisioned hiring a graduate student, possibly from the sociology department, to gather a representative sample of student papers and run them through Turnitin.com, a website which matches student papers against a database of existing assignments to check for similarities.

Amata had noticed the absence of statistics in policy discussions regarding academic honesty.

“You don’t really know, without having any hard data, how big of a problem it is,” Amata said. “You have faculty reporting it as a problem, but again, if you’re going to invest time and energy into creating programs to deal with it, you want to sort of know how big of a problem it is.”

He said the graduate student would need to develop a consistent methodology and the study would be more complex than simply surveying people to ask if they had cheated. Amata estimated that the study would cost about $4,000.

When the proposal was sent to Academic Affairs, however, it found little support. Amata said former Provost Ric Brown, who retired in 2006, did not think the university could afford it. Since then, the university’s financial situation has only worsened, and anything perceived as nonessential is not a high priority.

“This isn’t the kind of time that this is going to happen,” Amata said.

Disparities with UC Davis

Twenty miles west at UC Davis, campus administrators process academic honesty cases significantly differently.

At UC Davis, all academic honesty cases are entered into a centralized database. Because of this, it was able to provide detailed statistics showing the number of cases referred to the office and the disposition of cases.

The numbers released by the Student Judicial Affairs office, in response to a public records request, show that over 10 years, from the 2001-02 school year to present, UC Davis officials received an average of 519 cases each year and found 93.7 percent of the time the student had committed the alleged violation.

Although Sac State officials were unable to provide data on the number of cases that Student Affairs processes annually, there is evidence to suggest that it is significantly less than what happens at UC Davis.

Uplinger told The State Hornet in Feb. 2004 that 22 cases of academic dishonesty were reported during the 2001-02 academic year, and 58 were reported during the 2002-03 year. Of the 58 students referred to Student Affairs that year, three of them were suspended, Uplinger said.

While it is unclear how many additional cases were dealt with internally in individual departments, students could only have received administrative punishments other than failing the course if their cases had been referred to Student Affairs. The Student Judicial Affairs office at UC Davis processed 473 cases in 2001-02, and 450 cases in 2002-03.

Valdez said since he was promoted to his current position as director of student conduct in 2005, he has expelled one student for academic dishonesty violations. At UC Davis during that time period, 32 students were expelled.

At one point, UC Davis officials advised Sac State faculty as they were revising the campus academic honesty policy. Krabacher said while the committee did meet with UC Davis officials, it also modeled the policy on other schools’ existing policies, like San Jose State University. Years later, San Jose State revised its policy and borrowed from Sac State’s new policy, Krabacher said.

UC Davis’ office of Student Judicial Affairs uses a student panel system called the Campus Judicial Board rather than allowing an administrator to decide the merits of a case, like Sac State does.

Existing student members select new members through an application process in the spring quarter of each academic year. The members work to educate other students on the principles of academic honesty and also serve on formal hearing panels that determine the outcome of cases.

Students control the panels’ decisions because there are two students and one faculty member on each panel, said Donald Dudley, director of student judicial affairs.

Teddi Fishman, director of the International Center for Academic Integrity, said allowing students on panels is an important step and causes students to view the panels as more legitimate, in the same way that a jury’s verdict in a courtroom trial is respected because it is composed of the defendant’s peers. But for some, student participation can be unnerving, Fishman said.

“I like to see students be a majority on the panels,” Fishman said. “That scares faculty sometimes.”

Fishman said some faculty may fear the prospect of a student-run panel letting plagiarists off the hook, but the evidence actually indicates otherwise – students on academic honesty panels are, in reality, stricter towards their peers.

“I had to sweat in my calc class and you brought your answers in your sleeve?” Fishman said students ask. “That’s not fair.”

In the California State University system, involving students in the academic honesty process is expressly prohibited, even though policy experts like Fishman consider it a key element of an effective system. CSU Chancellor Charles Reed, in Executive Order 1043, established that hearing officers may only be “campus officials, attorneys licensed to practice in California, or administrative law judges from the Office of Administrative Hearings.”

CSU Spokesperson Erik Fallis said administrators were more capable than students of making decisions that considered the individual circumstances of each case of academic dishonesty.

Fallis said that a trial-like system could be intimidating for students and that CSU officials believed it was inappropriate for students to hear details of other students’ dishonesty violations.

Sometimes sensitive issues like learning disabilities or mental health problems could come into play in a hearing, Fallis said, and students should not have to share that kind of personal information with other students, even students who are trained to participate in the system.

Allowing student participation could create greater potential for leaks of students’ personal information, whereas when the information is limited to administrators, CSU officials can guarantee that their own employees will not break the rules, Fallis said.

Echoing Fishman’s argument in favor of student involvement, Fallis said, “A lot of these campuses that have an honor code, the students are actually much more harsh on their fellow students than administrators are inclined to be.”

Sanctions vary among universities

Even when students at Sac State are sanctioned for plagiarism, some of the recommended punishments are more subjective and more lenient than some other universities.

At Sac State, before the incident leaves the classroom, professors exercise some degree of subjectivity. The professor can choose to give the student an oral reprimand, reduce the assigned grade, or refer the matter to Student Affairs (in addition to, or instead of the previous options).

While officials have the option of imposing administrative sanctions against students found to have cheated, there is no requirement that they do so.

Valdez said allowing this subjectivity was appropriate.

“I grant them that privilege and it’s theirs to take,” Valdez said. “The academy is driven by faculty and God bless them. They are what makes this place run.”

Some universities, though, go further in establishing mandatory disciplinary actions for students who commit acts of academic dishonesty. At Stanford University, students are suspended for one quarter and must complete 40 hours of community service.

One of the strictest examples may be the University of Virginia, where the school’s 171-year-old honor code subjects accused students to a student-led Honor Committee that is tasked with enforcing the school’s code of conduct. Originating on Nov. 12, 1840, when a masked student shot and killed a law professor, the code is three words long: students pledge not to “lie, cheat, or steal” within the city of Charlottesville, Va., surrounding Albemarle County or wherever they represent themselves as University of Virginia students. The committee can impose only a single penalty – expulsion. The university’s website warns, “Applicants who are not prepared to embrace this freedom and accept responsibility should not apply for admission.”

Ann Marie McKenzie, chair of the Honor Committee and a senior history and American studies major at the University of Virginia, said the system’s complete student control was a mark of the university’s faith in students.

“The administration really believes that students have the ability and the maturity to step up to the plate in all of these instances, and that that’s really learning how to be responsible adults in the real world,” Mckenzie said.

McKenzie said University of Virginia students benefit from the honor code. Professors are more willing to administer take home tests and take students at their word when they give an excuse for missing class, and students can leave laptops and other personal belongings in public areas while they get coffee and trust that other students will not steal them.

“The benefits come when you need somebody to trust you,” McKenzie said. “You don’t necessarily need a note from your doctor or an obituary of your grandmother when she dies.”

While Virginia’s single-sanction method for dealing with cases of academic dishonesty may seem extreme, the honor committee does provide detailed statistics on the disposition of its cases and posts detailed surveys annually of faculty and students to gauge opinions of the program. And because students are in control, the committee could vote to end the policy, or alter it, if they choose to.

“It’s hard to say if we didn’t have this community of trust, what it would look like,” McKenzie said.

The policy today

Gordon said he has learned, in time, to accept the benefits of having a centralized system for disciplining students who violate the academic honesty policy. But he said that learning that Student Affairs had not been reporting data on the numbers of academic dishonesty cases it had records of was concerning.

“In the current system, they’re all in one place and so if anything goes wrong, it’s all on that one office that is really charged with that one job,” Gordon said, “and that’s probably a good idea for everybody concerned.”

Fishman said the challenges of implementing a new policy at Sac State were “one of those things that’s kind of tricky.”

“Certainly, people have to get used to a new system,” Fishman said. “On the other hand, it’s important to set an example – this is what we said we were going to do, and this is what we did.”

 

How often do students cheat?

Research by the International Center for Academic Integrity has established a consistent percentage of students who are likely to cheat, Fishman said.

A survey of about 71,300 students from 2002-11 shows among undergraduate students at four-year colleges, about 68 percent admit to some form of cheating. Of these students, 62 percent admit to some form of written cheating, while 39 percent say they have cheated on a test.

Fishman said other research by the organization had found about 20 percent of students, if tempted, would not cheat. Another 20 percent will usually cheat if they think they can get away with it. The remaining 60 percent of students, Fishman said, just want to be informed of what the academic honesty policies are and why they matter.

“Unfortunately, that 20 percent (who will cheat) have to have some clear and fair penalties for them so they are not getting credit to which they’re not entitled,” Fishman said.