Despite the fact that teachers, parents and administrators have hammered it into students' heads since elementary school that plagiarizing and cheating will inevitably lead to punishment and dishonor in the academic community, many still decide to partake in such activities. During the chaos of finals, the desire to plagiarize can be greater than ever.
Nearly 50 percent of students at the University of Cambridge have plagiarized, according to a recent study conducted by the university's student newspaper. Out of 1,014 survey respondents, 49 percent reported committing an act of plagiarism, while only five percent of such students reported being caught.
According to Dean of Student Affairs Bruce Reitman, about 2.5 percent of the student body — about 100 to 140 students — is faced with a plagiarism allegation each year at Tufts.
Reitman explained that although not all allegations ultimately result in proven infractions, most do.
"I would say that approximately 80 percent of the allegations that are raised are found to be valid accusations," Reitman said. "I think it's because most professors don't bring forth allegations unless they're pretty sure. It's not just a toss-up — there's often already been some research on the part of the faculty before they bring things forward."
Reitman added that even though most allegations are accurate, they still may indicate only a portion of the academic dishonesty at Tufts, because many cases likely go unnoticed.
"What total percentage of students is participating in unethical activity? Most people would say it's certainly higher than 2.5 percent," Reitman said.
The university has made many attempts to reduce such fraudulence, including the establishment of a universalized academic integrity code two years ago and the installation of the plagiarism detection service, Turnitin.com, one year prior.
"Plagiarism hasn't necessarily been a problem in my classes in recent years, but there were a couple of instances in the more distant past," Associate Professor of Sociology James Ennis said.
Ennis noted that the utilization of Turnitin.com in many of Tufts' courses has acted as more of a deterrent to plagiarism than anything else. He added that many students don't realize that the site stores copies of their essays in the database in order to prevent students from re-using the papers of their peers.
Reitman said that it wasn't until this year that professors started seeing issues of duplicate assignments on Turnitin.com.
"This year, [the site] started reporting duplicates of work that had already been turned in, in the same class, in previous years," Reitman said. "What's interesting about the longitudinal aspect of [Turnitin.com] is that you can't have that analysis until you've been an institutional member of [the Web site] for a while — I can tell you, three years is long enough. It's the life span of a student, so we're seeing these cases."
According to Reitman, before the School of Arts and Sciences and the School of Engineering had implemented the universal code, action was often up to the discretion of the professor when dealing with a student under suspicion.
"Some faculty members would see them as incidents for which separation from the institution was the only logical or appropriate outcome, because they came from schools with honor code environments," Reitman said. "Other faculty members saw these as educational opportunities and didn't impose a code violation and rather saw it as a chance to re-write the paper. That got to be … a point of contention among faculty members."
Through the introduction of the academic integrity system, it is now a requirement that any speculation of an infraction be reported to the dean. Choosing to inform the student, however, is up to the professor.
"Some faculty members just send the case over to us, and we're the ones to inform the student that there has been a report, but I think more often faculty members inform students that they're sending the case over," Reitman said.
Ennis said he feels that the aspect of notifying the dean may be crucial, as the problem could be pertinent to the student's other professors.
"The faculty has some discrepancy in how to handle issues of plagiarism, but oftentimes the deans want to know, because if there's a problem in one course, there may be a problem in other courses," he said.
In order to prevent students from plagiarizing from the get-go, Ennis strives to create assignments that evade the problem entirely.
"I've tried to organize my assignments in a way that is not conducive to plagiarizing — such [as] getting students to develop their work over the semester by having proposals and conversations prior to when the assignments are due," he said. "I often also require paper presentations, and if [students have] plagiarized, they are less likely to want to talk about their paper [in front of a class]."
Some students feel that they have had to be additionally cautious about citing their sources since coming to Tufts, so as not to breach the academic code.
"I've heard that the consequences for plagiarism here are really severe, so I'm always extra careful when it comes to checking my citations," junior Olivia Hole said.
