That isn’t a typo — the issue is students who talk to each other while taking exams.
I received the following via email from a reader (lightly edited to remove identifying details):
I’m wondering if you and your readers can help me analyze this situation.
I caught two students talking during an exam.
This is not the first time for this pair. The first time this happened, I explicitly communicated my expectations about conduct during an exam to all of my students, specifically stating that talking during an exam will be taken as cheating. The academic integrity section of the undergraduate bulletin also states that conversation during an exam is not allowed.
After the second incident, I wanted to penalize both students with a zero for said exam and forfeiture of the dropped-lowest-exam-score policy. The students immediately said they will appeal to the dean and their parents have been hounding the chair as well as the administration.
The message I’m getting now is that I cannot prove the talking during the exam actually took place (although I saw it). Not only that, I’m basically being bullied to drop it for fear that the parents will file a law suit, maybe because the administration has decided the university cannot deal with another scandal after a recent one fueled by alcohol.
My question is, when did talking during exams become acceptable? (That it’s acceptable is the message I’m getting regardless of what’s written in the academic bulletin). I have not been teaching long but have read about faculty being fearful of repercussions when reporting cheating students. I don’t want to end up like that, compromising my principles for fear of repercussions such as loss of job (I’m not protected by tenure). Unfortunately, this is where I am headed. This whole incident is very demoralizing. Is it too much to expect students to abide by a shared code of conduct during exams? Is this response by chair and administration common?
I’m going to give my advice on this situation, but since my correspondent specifically requested help from you, the commentariat, please post your advice in the comments, making sure to point out ways you think my advice goes wrong.
First off, let me say that I feel this instructor’s pain. At my current institution, we have lots of institutional support to enforce the official standards of academic integrity, and I’m not aware of any instances of parents threatening to take legal action if their little darlings are held to such standards. However, at my graduate institution, where the undergraduate tuition was in the ballpark of $40K a year, it was frankly appalling how common such threats of parental interference were. (Perhaps when you’re shelling out that much money, you figure you’ve bought the diploma, and successful, honest completion of the coursework is the kind of trifling detail that ought to be overlooked.) Moreover, the standards of evidence to demonstrate student cheating fell just short of requiring a DNA swab.
It was, for instructional staff and honest students alike, pretty demoralizing.
Still, there are times when some amount of demoralization seems like what is required to stay employed. The question then becomes: what can you do to improve the situation in your classroom given the way that your superiors understand their interests and the interests of the institution?
There are at least a few dimensions of the situation in the classroom to consider here. One is what will effectively prevent students from cheating. Another is what will protect the interests of the honest students in the classroom. As well, you want to feel like you’re upholding standards of scholarship and academic integrity — conveying to students what is expected of them — and like you can look them in the eye without losing all hope in their generation. Plus, you don’t want to become the kind of person who will compromise your principles for a paycheck, since if that’s what you’re into, there are ways to do it that are much more profitable than teaching.
It sounds like this is a situation in which parents are prepared to sue and the administration is prepared to fold. That’s unfortunate, but sometimes it shakes out that way. This pair may get away with cheating in this class, and without the support of your chair, your dean, or the rest of the administration, there may be nothing you can do about it. (Well, there may be something you can do about them, but we’ll return to that in a moment.)
From the point of view of heading off future incidents like this, a strategy to consider is bringing the students in your class into an explicit discussion of academic integrity (including the no-talking-during-exams rule) and why it should matter to them. Especially if you’re grading them on a curve, they are hurt when their classmates break the rules to get unauthorized assistance on exams or other assignments. One response might be for everyone to cheat, but you should be able to help them see this as a risky strategy. If the course covers material they will plausibly need to know in their intended career, or in a job interview in their profession, or even in the next course in the sequence, then not actually knowing that material when they leave the course could hurt them (or others) regardless of the grade on their transcripts.
Cheating, in other words, is as much a crime against your classmate who has bothered to do the work to learn the material as it is against the instructor from whom you’re trying to extract more points that you deserve.
What does this mean for the class? Among other things, it means that students have a stake in shutting down exam-talkers. Students should know better to talk during exams themselves, and in instances where they are aware of others talking during exams, they should feel empowered to say, at a volume audible to the whole class, “There’s no talking during exams. Please knock it off.” If you, as the instructor, become aware of exam-talking, I’d think it would be appropriate to loudly call both parties to the front of the room and relocate each of them on opposite ends of the room with fresh exams. (I have done this myself. It seems to remind students rather quickly of what kind of behavior is expected in an exam setting.)
Of course, not everyone is brave enough to stand up to their classmates. Recognizing this, you can let the class know that you’re also happy to accept their reports of exam-talking (including identification of the offenders) privately — preferably in writing or via email. This kind of student testimony, by the way, would seem to go some way towards corroborating the actual occurrence of the forbidden even. Armed with such testimony, the administration might be able to get irate parents to back down from threats of legal action (since presumably students who don’t cheat are also paying tuition and also have rights).
Beyond making the students your partners in establishing a classroom community that’s serious about academic integrity, it’s probably worth seeking out the administrative office concerned with violations of the student code of conduct. Here, probably the best thing to do is to be candid about your concerns — the rules won’t do much if there is no penalty for breaking them, and especially if the students who have already broken them know that there’s no penalty for breaking them. So, given that this office wants students to live within these rules (and faculty to assume them), what would they recommend in dealing with classroom violations of them? What kind of back-up are they willing to give you? What kind of strategies do they have for dealing with cheaters with litigious parents? What kinds of strategies have they seen that are successful in keeping students from cheating and/or in neutralizing the cheaters?
Possibly, in the course of this discussion, you will find that your “dean of cheating” (or whatever the official designation may be) keeps track of instructor reports of student (mis)conduct. This may be a measure to prevent the perennial plagiarist from claiming the tenth instance of verbatim copying in her college career as “the first time I’ve ever done this, and I see now that it was a really bad decision”. Or, it may be a measure designed to build strong enough evidence of wrongdoing that lawsuit-happy parents will back the heck down and actually demand that their little darlings start playing by the rules (or at least covering their tracks better).
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Again, if you have advice to offer here (or have detected fatal flaws in the advice I’m offering), please tell us about it in the comments.
If your cell phone has a video cam option, employ that.
I think your suggestions are great, especially the one about following up with the administration to find out exactly how flexible their spines are when it comes to these situations.
It’s probably self evident to do this, but I state up front in my syllabus exactly what cheating is, what the penalties for cheating are (to the fullest extent of stated university consequences is what I start with), and that I have a zero tolerance for any of these observed cheating behaviors in my classroom. I impress upon them that remaining in the class after we’ve gone over the syllabus–which we do together as a class–implies tacit agreement to the syllabus and its contents as a contract. They also have to sign it.
I’ve only once ever had a cheating problem in my class, and the student capitulated immediately to having done it. At the time, I gave her one warning that was not specific, “I see people whose eyes are clearly not on their own exams. If I see that again, there will be consequences for the parties concerned.” Yet, she couldn’t help herself and did it again, and she received a zero for that exam after we discussed the situation. That was codified in my syllabus, and I never heard from administration or anyone else about it.
So, I’ve not encountered this specific situation before. In such a scenario, I’d suggest clearing the air all around by offering to let the students each take the exam (or some variation of it) alone, under proctor. And then, they can take the grade they get or an average of the two exam grades, or whatever. That gets the university and parents off of your back because if the students decline this perfectly reasonable solution, they look like they may indeed have had reasons to be talking during an exam.
And then, I’d be sure that my syllabus has codified exactly what the penalties are for cheating and that the students must accept that my word regarding cheating is the last word. No open doors. Students in my classes must provide a signature on the last page of the syllabus that states that they have read it in whole and agree to its contents. It may not be legally bullet proof or anything, but they know from the get-go that this is serious.
Also? I’m just APPALLED that the university would be such invertebrates about the parental whining here.
How are these exams done? How many (if any) proctors are present? As a Northern European student, where voluntary seniors (usually) are supervising exams as proctors, I have never seen or heard anyone talk during exams. If someone opens their mouth, immediate attention is given from the closest proctor, and they are told to shut the fuck up and raise their arm if they need anything.
Exams are also always mixed: we never sit next to classmates, and as far as possible next to someone taking a completely different subject.
Is this a private institution? My feelings are that private institutions may put more pressure on faculty to bow to parental (“consumer”) pressure on these issues than public ones. An acquaintance has had massive admin pressure to a) not fail clearly deserving students or b) punish them for things like forging a note from the Nurse in the student health center for an “excused absence.” Not having the backing of the administration is the height of demoralization.
The Dean should just back the instructor. This is terrible.
I don’t know what to say. I would want to just submit the grades as you see fit and then make the administration break their own rules to change them back.
When I’ve encountered cheating during semester prior to the last date for a W grade, I give the student a 0 on the assignment, inform them that I know they were cheating and strongly encourage them to withdraw from the class because I will be watching them like a hawk the rest of the semester and a second offense will result in a F for the course and reporting to the Dean of Cheating. Both times this has happened in my upper level classes, the student in question has immediately withdrawn from the class. Yes, technically, I am supposed to report these first offenses to the Dean of Cheating, but I fear exactly the sort of situation your letter writer describes.
We had a student who stole an exam before the exam was given, and shared it with another student, who made a xerox copy of it, and turned it in. We gave both students an F in the course. We being two Full Professors. We got some flack about not having followed protocol. Our response was we flunked them and they are going to stay flunked. That was the end of that.
I’ve read stories about parents threatening to sue over their students who got caught cheating that end with the administration folding. However, I’ve never actually heard of any actual suits taking place. Has that actually happened before?
I don’t see a practical way out other than offering the exam again, proctored carefully. If it were me, I would ask the dean to provide an outside proctor for that and future exams so that there would at least be another person’s word to back me up.
In addition, I would also sit the students in question in assigned seats and keep a very close eye on them in future exams.
To Jim Thomerson, I first want to say way to go! That’s way awesome.
I just had a class this last semester where all the tests were done in class, but the class was really crowded and even if you were looking straight at your paper, you usually couldn’t help but see the test next to yours. We have a testing center, but for some reason he didn’t use it (I asked him once and he said something about the testing center not liking his tests, which is the first I had ever heard of something like that). So if your university has one, I would suggest having the tests done there. The two offending students might still try to sit together and chat, but testing center employees are usually hard-asses about any suspicious behaviour. Plus, at least in ours, they have video cameras to document any incidents of cheating.
I also agree with enlisting student testimony in the matter. If there were other students who witnessed the chatting that would also be willing to send a note saying as much, it might help give the administration a stronger spine.
I’m also curious just what kind of lawsuit the parents could bring up. Even just the threat is unnerving, but realistically what charges could they bring? I would think the most they could do would be to demand that semester’s tuition back.
Who are they cheating, but themselves.
Assign seats for the exams.
Dennis, Stanley Fish had an essay on his nyt blog last week about liability in the academy. It’s largely a question of setting up a protocol and failing to follow it to the letter. Perhaps professors need to do what employers do in these situations and write up the infraction and insist that the student sign off on it.
The obvious solution is to keep the offenders on opposite sides of the room. If they want to yell across the room at one another, well, that makes it pretty obvious what they’re doing: hard to deny it then.
You might also get another person there to sit through the exam with you, so you have a witness to their talking. This person wouldn’t have to do much, and could just read a book until/unless the sound of talking echoed about the room, at which point s/he could look up, note who’s talking, and go back to the book.
One of the other commenters talked about having a problem with a small test area, making it all but impossible to see your neighbor’s tests. For this, I’d suggest turning half the seating backwards, so that your neighbors to left and right are facing the opposite direction from you. It’s still possible to read someone’s work upside-down, but it’s difficult and slows you down a lot. Probably not worth the information you get against the time lost reading it.
“The students immediately said they will appeal to the dean and their parents have been hounding the chair as well as the administration. ”
Students say that often. I find that it rarely has teeth. Snowflakes that are cheaters are usually liars too. Do they really want to call Mommy and Daddy and have them drive to campus to discuss that they are incapable of following simple directions? Mom and Dad’s attorney will get a great $350 per hour laugh out of it too.
The rest of the class is seeing that you aren’t enforcing your policies. That’s not going to play well and will have repercussions later.
I’d go ahead and enforce your policy on this second exam. If you’re not comfortable doing this, you can try this…
Talk you your chair, making sure that you have their support on this. Then notify the students in writing on letterhead that you WILL enforce your policy on the next exam. Have another faculty member sit in the back of the room as a witness, then enforce the policy. If they want to take it up the chain, fine. Let the Dean be the one that folds, but you’ve maintained your integrity.
Alternately, write them a letter stating that for the rest of the term they are taking their exams in opposite corners of the room, or different rooms or whatever. Make it clear that this is because they have violated class policies TWICE. Sign off with “any questions regarding this decision can be discussed with Dr. Chairofdepartment. That lets them know that you are DONE talking about it and that you’re not afraid of your supervisors.
I’d be very curious to know if they are pulling this crap in other courses.
One thing I encountered in school was instructors who would make up more than one version of the exam, and hand them out in such a manner as to ensure that students seated adjacent to one another had different exams. Even if the change is simply in the order of the questions, it makes cheating much more difficult, since quietly whispering “What do you have for #4?” without being noticed is much easier than quiety whispering an entire exam question.
In this specific case, of course, you’re already past that. I’d probably just bite the bullet and say my decision stands unless the administration is ready to overrule me on it. Of course, my unwillingness to deal with precisely this kind of politics is the main reason I didn’t become a teacher, so my advice on that is of questionable value.
You have to have a witness, or you have to be absolutely meticulous in your documentation. Plagiarism when it’s copying from a book is usually easier.
Talk to your chair and dean before putting anything on paper. Get their full backing, in writing, and ask them if they will back you even if the parents get nasty. This is crucial. If you don’t get backing, you should then reconsider your chances in this economy of getting another job if you started before they got to start rumors.
I’ve been sued, in the sense that the suit was filed in superior court for the county of Los Angeles, CA. The school backed me 110% (but this was circa 1973, and it was a public university) My defense was very strong and incredibly well documented. In the end the child settled out of court for the following: 1) he did not receive credit in the course; it was agreed that he could not retake the course for any other professor w/o telling him/her the entire tale; 3) He agreed to accept the grade of “W-X” (especially created) which meant that he was allowed to withdraw from the course without the penalty of an F on his permanent record, but with the notation that the withdrawal occurred subsequent to his taking and failing the final examination.
The reason we felt we had to put an end to this charade in a way that was more public than just an F was the following: the kid was legally blind, and had used that excuse to jolly all of his professors into giving him one grade higher than he deserved because he “tried so hard” and had “such a sad handicap.” The dean interviewed all of his previous professors, and found out that they had done just that. Some times it was two letter grades. I should tell you that he was pre-med and hoped to be a surgeon one day, a neurosurgeon. I would not have wanted him messing inside of my skull!
His little brother called me to beg for the “honor grade of A which” the boy deserved and got in most of his classes.” (and to threaten me with another lawsuit and maybe with a bullet) The father called and accused me of being anti-Jewish. This didn’t stick, as I am Jewish and most of my close colleagues as well as my PhD adviser were too. And my wife. The boy’s mother made the classic offer often joked about but rarely actually made, of a trade to get an A grade.
But I’ve lost a few too. At a major Southern state university I caught a senior woman plagiarizing in the astronomy for jocks course, the course where everybody should be able to get a passing grade. She had copied her required term paper line for line from a classic text book, and I recognized it. Her father argued with me that he was a political big shot, and that if his daughter had been accused of cheating, he would have gone along with the Prof. But since it was *only* plagiarizing, that seemed too harsh. The University’s Stu/Fac honor committee decided that she had plagiarized, but that she was too ignorant to understand that was wrong!!! It suggested anonymous probation for a semester.
The chancellor of the campus decided that was too lenient, and increased the punishment to a very strict form of probation which forbade her to represent the Univ in any way whatever outside of class. The girl was a senior, and for her senior year had been elected president of her sorority, and head of the pom-pom team for the football season. She had to resign from all of that, and presumably had to tell people that she had resigned. At least a few had to know why she resigned. I lost this one, if you ask me since I wanted her suspended. But the wise old chancellor might just have gotten it right. She was majoring in elementary education, and would shortly have been teaching our children.
Get the data; talk to your chain of command; and stand as firm as they will support. Good luck.
I was enrolled in a community college about 20 years ago. During exams, my French professor would invariably leave the room for several minutes, whereupon the students would all start talking out loud to each other: “What’s the word for …?” “How do you say …?”
I have no idea why she did this. Was she perhaps judged by the grades of her students?
I never had the faintest idea what to do about it either, aside from sticking my fingers in my ears while it was going on. I suppose I should have spoken with the department head, but that wouldn’t have occurred to me at that age.