Academic Honesty |
Issue 15
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Few have careers where you look forward to returning to work on Monday. For Scott Greene, the Monday high paled in comparison to the anticipation of returning to start the new school year in the fall. Scott wasn’t pathological. He enjoyed his weekends just fine. And if truth be told, by the middle of the spring quarter, he always found himself eager for summer vacation.
Scott simply loved being a professor at a small liberal arts college. In what was usually intended as a putdown, he relished being the “sage on the stage.” Sure, half of his audience on any given day looked bored, if not downright asleep. But he had learned very early on to focus on the other half. He could almost always find faces that found the ontological argument or the trolley problem fascinating. He took satisfaction in preparing his lectures and turning a new generation on to the wonders of analytical philosophy. Toulmin College was hardly a research institution, so the pressure to publish had never been a major professional concern. Still, he took great pride in his modest scholarly contributions to his discipline. So, what was not to like? Most of his colleagues would have said the petty academic politics or grading papers. Scott, however, immensely enjoyed the give-and-take of shared governance, though he, often as not, found himself on the losing end of the issues he most cared about. No professor is going to say that they enjoy grading. But his glass-is-half-full personality rescued him here as well. The papers or essay exams that demonstrated fundamental understanding more than compensated for the drudgery of wading through the many that did not. Scott’s problem was cheating. He prided himself on being an honest man. Usually, the occasions were relatively trivial. Several times, he called service providers back to his table to correct mistakes on the check. Most of these were to the advantage of the restaurant. A forgotten beer here, a second glass of wine there. None of this resulted from some deeply religious upbringing or anything of that sort. All of this simply came naturally to him. Or perhaps it had something to do with karma. Once, he found a wallet on the subway. It contained over three hundred dollars. Using nothing but the information on the driver’s license, he ascertained the owner’s phone number and email address and arranged to meet and return it. Less than a year later, while on vacation in Virginia, he absent-mindedly put his own iPhone, which doubled as his wallet, on his rental car’s roof as he pulled off an unnecessary sweater and promptly drove off. Miraculously, the phone, all of his credit cards, and cash arrived three weeks later in the mail, without so much as a how do you do, or the chance to thank his benefactor or offer a reward. So, why did lying, stealing, and cheating haunt his professorial life? # # #
The year in North Dakota was a blur of exhaustion, exhilaration, and, ultimately, disenchantment. The disappointment was not receiving a tenure-track job offer. The weariness was the typical fate of most beginning professors, with new courses to create and prep for and a whole new work rhythm to adjust to. Being a professor was a lot harder than being a TA. But all of this was more than overshadowed by the pure joy of having secured his first job and the confident feeling that he was beginning his dreamed-about career.
The death penalty played a significant role in his Contemporary Moral Problems course. Emily Cranor’s term paper started promisingly. She had obviously done the reading and understood some of the finer points in the controversy Scott had labored to bring out in his lectures. But something nagged in the back of his mind. Wasn’t this paper not just good, but too good? In graduate school, Scott had learned a nifty trick to track down plagiarism. He went to his trusty Google page and picked a particularly professional-sounding section from Emily’s paper. He then started a search. The very first hit was a Wikipedia article on capital punishment. The suspicious passage was right there in so many words. But the real bonus was in the citations the online author had included. Several were classics that Scott instantly recognized, but the one that caught his eye was “Three Problems with Capital Punishment,” the exact title of Emily’s paper. Sure enough, she had simply stolen the first half of the relatively obscure scholar’s article. This was a problem three times over. As a TA, plagiarism was not his direct responsibility but that of the professor whose course he was assisting in. He would simply report his suspicions, and that was pretty much the end of the matter, at least as far as he was concerned. Now, however, this was definitely his problem, and he had no idea what his strategy for cheating was going to be. A stern warning? An F on the assignment? Failure in the course? Or a formal disciplinary charge with a recommendation for expulsion? To make matters worse, Scott had no idea what Central North Dakota State’s academic honesty policy was. But all this paled in comparison to the real dilemma. Emily Cranor was no ordinary student. She was the fiancée of one of Scott’s new colleagues. Indeed, Emily and George had invited him to dinner to welcome him to the Division of Arts and Letters. What in God’s name was he supposed to do now? At a purely pragmatic level, the answer was obvious. Just ignore everything and give Emily her ill-gotten A. The last thing he needed when he desperately wanted a permanent job offer was to make enemies. To his profound shame, he seriously considered this option. But in the end, he found himself more offended that Emily had put him in such an untenable position than he was professionally circumspect. What the hell? He made the appointment to see his new division chair. Donald Singer was a thoughtful man, and he immediately saw the predicament. “Well, damn, Scott, this is something of a cluster fuck, isn’t it? You can do whatever your conscience dictates. You’ll have the full support of my office. I have to tell you, though, George Scanlon is going to have a shitfit. For the sake of peace in the Division, I wish we could find some less confrontational way of dealing with this.” Scott sadly smiled. “I appreciate your backing, and I totally understand your concerns. If I’m honest, I don’t even know what my conscience dictates. Do you have any suggestions?” “I’m going to be more than a little indiscreet here,” Singer began. “I hope you will keep this between the two of us. George needs to know about this. It’s been less than two years since his divorce. I like Emily just fine, but she’s reckless. What the fuck was she thinking? With your permission, I’d like to inform George about what’s happened. I’ll tell him Emily must withdraw from your course. The two of them can figure things out from there. How does that sound?” Scott merely offered a sad nod. My God, the realization hit him. That’s a much greater price to pay than an F on the paper or even an F in the course. We’re fucking with someone’s marriage. Well, at least future marriage. Is this what he really wanted? Maybe Dr. Singer was right. Probably George did need to know. But then again, was this any of their business? A big part of him wished he had simply given her the A. The paper was of publishable quality, after all. # # #
Years later, there was a time he had one of his students dead to rights only to be informed that the parents were considering a lawsuit. To his great surprise, the new provost informed him, “let them sue. We’ll most likely lose. But we’ll look good going down.” On one occasion, he found two suspicious papers and decided to try an experiment. He went into class the next day and announced, “we’ve got a problem here. I’m pretty sure there was academic dishonesty on the last assignment. I have decided that if the guilty parties come to my office so we can talk about all of this, I will allow the opportunity to resubmit without penalty.” Sure enough, in the next two days, three of his pupils scheduled appointments to confess their sins. The only problem was that neither of the original suspects said a peep.
By the time he had received tenure, Scott had established a protocol for handling these issues. He always included strong language in his course syllabus, highlighting the importance of academic honesty and announcing a policy of referring all cheating cases to the Student Behavior Committee with a recommendation for expulsion. This was mainly bluster on his part. The majority of cases resulted only in an F on the assignment and, hopefully, his having put the fear of God into the little dipshit who had caused the hassle. Scott had also revised his policy on exams. Early in his career, he had used bluebooks for closed-book, closed-note essay exams. He came to realize, however, that this rewarded those students who were good memorizers and first-draft writers. He decided that take-home essay exams were a more accurate measure of what his students had learned. He didn’t want these exams to be a cover for just another term paper, so he asked very specific questions, stipulated a firm word count limit, and reassured them that spelling, grammar, and the other niceties of formal writing would play no factor in the grading. Clarity, however, certainly would. # # #
On Thursday morning of finals week, Scott dutifully sat in 108 Brown Hall from eight to ten, the scheduled time of his final exam, while intermittent groups showed up to turn in their exams. At five after ten, he packed up the stack of exams and trundled back to his office, having already decided to use the rest of the day to grade them all and, if he was efficient, also calculate their final grades. Fortified by his third cup of coffee, he was in the middle of a particularly distressing attempt to make sense of the prisoner’s dilemma when there was a knock at his office door.
“Professor Greene,” Dennis Ridley began. “I overslept. I hope you will accept my final. And I have Jenny Rodrigues’s here, too. She got a ride home last night and asked me to turn it in with mine.” “Well, it’s eleven fifteen,” Scott pretended to sound tough. “That’s an hour and fifteen minutes past the deadline. But what the hell? Consider this my Christmas present to you and Jenny. Put them here on the stack.” “Thanks, Professor,” Dennis nodded as he exited the office. Scott smiled to himself, shaking his head at the irresponsibility, and got back to his grading. Twenty minutes or so later, his bullshit detector started to go off. He dug in the pile and retrieved Dennis’s and Jenny’s exams. Even the most casual glance at their first paragraphs was enough to confirm his worst fears. They were identical, word-for-word. Even the punctuation was the same. “What the fuck?” he uttered aloud. How could they be so stupid? He wasn’t all that shocked at Dennis. He was a marginal student at best and probably needed a C+ on the final to pass the course. But Jenny Rodrigues? That was a surprise. She was in the running for an A. Without doing the math, he guessed that a solid B+ would have gotten her over the top. What in the world had she been thinking? But Scott had other things to worry about right now. There was the rest of his grading, of course. But he also needed to drive to Watertown and check out the necklace and earrings he had seen. They would be the perfect present for Susan. Well, at least there were two fewer exams requiring his attention. He summarily put big fat red F’s on each and returned to the prisoner’s dilemma. # # #
Part of the fun of the quarter system is that you get three do-overs every year. The fall quarter had been okay, but Scott didn’t think one of his best. But this quarter! Two of his favorite courses at his preferred times. He was sitting in his office, feeling smug about the introductory lecture he had just delivered, when there was a weak knock at his door. There standing before him was Jenny Rodrigues. “Come in, Jenny,” he politely declared. “Please sit down. What can I do for you?”
“Professor Greene,” Jenny began, “this is hard for me. But I kind of feel like you lied to me. I came to see you at the very beginning of last quarter.” “Yes, I remember,” Scott acknowledged. “Well, I told you then,” Jenny continued, “that I was concerned about taking Ethics from you since I’m very conservative. You told me that my politics and religious beliefs would not matter. All you cared about was understanding and defending a position with strong arguments. But when I got my report card and saw that I had gotten a C-, well, I just don’t think that’s fair.” This young woman just couldn’t be that good of an actress. Scott thought about his reply carefully. “Jenny, you don’t have any idea why you received that grade?” “I thought it was because I disagreed with you,” she answered. “Was there something else?” “Yes, I’m afraid there was,” Scott was already crafting a plan to undo this mess. “It had to do with the exams that Dennis Ridley turned in for the two of you.” “You mean,” Jenny’s tone changed to one bordering on outrage, “it’s because I left early and didn’t turn it in myself?” Scott could see the wheels turning in her head. Yet another inflection change reflected a redirection of her anger. “That’s not it, is it? Oh my God. I can’t believe he did that.” Scott went into his proper procedure mode. “Just to be sure, please tell me exactly what happened with your exam.” “Let’s see,” she was clearly trying to remember as accurately as she could, “my cousin called me up and told me she was driving through later that evening and could take me home for Christmas vacation. I was almost done with the exam, anyway. So I just hurried up and finished it. Just before dinner, I knocked on Denny’s door. He’s just one floor up in our dorm. I asked him to turn it in for me the next day, and he said he would.” “I will see if I can fix all of this,” Scott consoled. “But I’m afraid I’ll probably have to use your name. Are you okay with that?” “I guess so,” Jenny sounded doubtful. “Maybe we won’t have to,” Scott reassured. We’ll just have to see. But, in any case, I’ll take care of your grade today. I’m glad you came by. Letting that C- stand would have been a tragedy.” # # #
Scott trudged across campus to the registrar’s office. The first thing was the grade change. This was easy. Toulmin made it easy for a professor to change a grade they had previously assigned. A simple form, signed and dated, and that was that. Filing a student behavior complaint was a little more complicated. Scott decided to drop into Nancy Dennett’s office. She was the assistant registrar and the faculty representative to the Student Behavior Committee. “Hi, Nance, I’ve got a little problem that I was hoping you could give me some advice with.”
“Well, Professor Greene, how nice to see you,” she responded with mock formality. “How can I be of service?” “One of my students from last quarter,” Scott began his narrative, “plagiarized his take-home final exam from another student in the class. I gave him an F on the exam and that ensured that he ended up failing the course. The problem is he was going to fail anyway. He put one of the other student in harm’s way. I think this is a serious enough case to warrant more than the lousy grade he’d earned in the first place.” “Well,” Nancy explained, “you know the drill. Just fill out the disciplinary form. Briefly describe what happened and your suggested remedy. I take it you’re going to ask for expulsion. That’s the biggie, of course. I will call the student in and interview him. It’s his call. He can own up to the cheating and propose an alternate resolution. Or he can dispute the charge and ask for a full hearing with the entire committee.” “What a nightmare,” Scott bemoaned. “I can’t believe I’m starting the new quarter with this shit.” # # #
Young Mister Ridley’s strategy caught everyone off guard. He fully substantiated Jenny Rodrigues’s account of the take-home final. But he emphatically denied having copied it. He simply claimed to have no idea of why the two exams were identical. He demanded a full Student Behavior Committee hearing and, at his parents’ insistence, the presence of an attorney. The rules for hearings were clear, so the attorney would be there only as an observer. When the Board of Trustees heard about this last development, they insisted that a lawyer for the Board be present as well.
Scott’s area of scholarly expertise was the philosophy of law, or what, in law school, would have been called jurisprudence. He had lamented more than once, having not earned a joint J.D. and Ph.D. and trying his hand at being a law professor. If the truth be told, he was a hopeless wannabe lawyer. Now, he had a case to litigate. There were only two witnesses, Scott and Dennis Ridley. Dennis was obviously very nervous but told his narrative with conviction. “Colleagues and students,” Scott began. “Here are two take-home exams,” raising them to the committee for effect. “With one or two minor exceptions, they are word-for-word identical, right down to the punctuation. How could this be? Mr. Ridley claims to have no idea. Perhaps it was an amazing coincidence, and both students just happened to express themselves in identical language. Perhaps the explanation is something out of the Twilight Zone, and we just haven’t thought of it yet. My account is simple and direct. I contend that Mr. Ridley, having received Jenny’s exam the evening before, copied it and simply submitted her work as his own. It pains me, therefore, to point out that Dennis is not only guilty of academic dishonesty but of lying to this committee as well.” The committee’s verdict took less than half an hour, but their decision and recommendation to the Dean of Students was confidential until the President issued the college’s formal ruling. All of this took a couple of weeks. The committee decreed that Dennis Ridley had indeed cheated. They also recommended Scott’s suggested penalty of formal expulsion from Toulmin College. After a lengthy consultation with the Board and its attorney, however, the President chose not to expel him, but to impose a one-year suspension. A decision that Scott had no problems with. Mainly since Dennis and his parents decided not to pursue the matter any further. # # #
Scott occasionally crossed paths with Dennis in the two years after he returned to complete his baccalaureate. But they had no interaction. The professor was, therefore, dumbfounded when Dennis appeared at his office door the day before graduation. “Professor, I wanted you to know that I’m glad things worked out as they did. I learned a lot of things about myself, and I think I’m a better person because of it.” And with that, the two adversaries shook hands.
For nearly a decade, Scott took great satisfaction in the whole sordid affair. He had handled himself honorably and as a professional. He had also saved a young man from a life of dishonesty and perhaps crime. That contentment, however, vanished in the blink of an eye one morning when Scott read in the New York Times that a businessman named Dennis Trevor Ridley had been formally indicted in one of the largest Medicare frauds in history. Just to be sure, he checked his records. Sure enough, the middle name was the same. |
Jeffery Johnson is a retired professor of philosophy and an aspiring mystery and short story writer. His website is: https://jefferyljohnson.com/
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