Washington Week: Student Voices (O)

Rutgers committee to revise policy on plagiarism, cheating
By Shannon Ivery, Nicole DiCesare & Nia Hamm
Daily Targum (Rutgers)
03/06/2007

(U-WIRE) NEW BRUNSWICK, N.J. — Rutgers students could see harsher punishments when it comes to cheating if University administration gets its way.

After years of drawn-out judicial processes, the University is moving to revise its policies on student cheating and plagiarism.

Associate Vice President of Student Affairs Brian Rose said his office is not pleased with the current judicial process the University enforces when dealing with breaches of academic integrity.

"Faculty usually report their concerns about cheating students and go through Judicial Affairs," Rose said. "But many deal with students privately on their own."

Rose said not all professors and faculty submit the "Turnitin originality report," which is part of a program the University uses to limit student plagiarism and follow the proper proceedings when they've caught a student in the act of cheating.

Turnitin — a technology used for the digital assessment of student work — is one tool Rutgers uses to detect plagiarism among students. Every paper submitted is returned in the form of an originality report, which is sent to teachers using the program. From this report, teachers have the ability to assess suspicious content in a student's paper.

Tynika Williams, assistant dean for Judicial Affairs, said the current academic integrity policy has different levels of violations and punishments.

The most minor violations include cheating on homework and labs, and progress up to level five, which includes stealing exams or taking an exam for someone else.

Another problem with the current system is inequity because only a few students out of the cheating population are actually prosecuted and feel they've been singled out, said Leslie Fishbein, an associate professor of American Studies.

With so many inconsistencies, a committee of Rutgers faculty and staff were appointed last year to oversee the restructuring of the entire set of academic integrity policies, Rose said.

The committee intends to simplify the University's current policy by developing a simpler system to increase the reporting of cheating students from faculty and allow faculty to devise appropriate penalties under the review of a central judicial body, said Fishbein.

Cook College senior Nicky Lee is one student who has been reprimanded for improperly citing sources in one of his writing classes.

"I cited the sources," Lee said. "I just forgot to put quotation marks around the work that I cited."

As a result, he was given a level-two violation of the academic integrity policy, which resulted in his automatic failure of the class midterm, he said.

Mason Gross School of the Arts Associate Dean Dennis Benson said the committee has drafted its proposal and forwarded it to the University Senate for review. The Senate will then make its recommendations to University President Richard L. McCormick, who will make the final decision.

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