In the wake of a cheating scandal at Harvard allegedly involving 125 students, Brown continues to pilot-test a variety of methods to detect academic dishonesty. Last semester, the University offered a pilot test of Turnitin, a web-based service that allows professors to compare students' written work with other submissions from the class as well as millions of other documents in the program's database and online. The program was largely met with praise, but it will not be offered again this semester while administrators deliberate over whether to permanently adopt it as an optional service for faculty.
The pilot test arose from a recommendation by Tom Doeppner, associate professor of computer science and former chair of the Committee on the Academic Code, in a spring 2010 committee report to offer a trial of the technology, Doeppner said. "Turnitin can definitely spot a number of plagiarism cases, and it provides convincing evidence," he said.
The University offered Turnitin last semester to any instructors who wanted to try it. Ultimately, 10 professors from an initial pool of 35 participated in the trial run.
"Among those who tried Turnitin, all but one felt it was successful," said Deputy Dean of the College Stephen Lassonde. Faculty feedback, as well as the degree to which Turnitin can integrate with Canvas - the University's new online learning management system - will be the main factors in the decision, he added.
While University officials and professors maintained that academic dishonesty remains an issue that should be addressed, they differed on the size of the problem.
"In a (2009 Herald) poll, 17 percent of Brown students admitted to violating the academic code at some point, but only 1 percent of students are reported and brought before the Code Committee," Lassonde said. "It's up to interpretation whether that constitutes a huge problem or not."
More often than not, cases of academic dishonesty arise by accident or because expectations are not clearly communicated in the classroom, Lassonde said.
A particular problem arises in "large lecture classes where there are first-year students who don't yet know the rules," said David Sobel, associate professor of cognitive, linguistic and psychological sciences. Such scenarios are more frequent than situations where students are deliberately cheating, he added.
Sobel said he has caught a fair number of students cheating during the 11 years he has taught at the University and said he typically identifies about one case per semester. While cheating is not an overwhelming pattern, reinforcing academic honesty should be a goal, he said.
Sobel, who used Turnitin last semester, said the software was a positive supplement to other cheating detection methods he uses in his classes. Last semester, he identified one case of cheating with Turnitin in addition to another case he caught himself. "Ideally, if Turnitin could be embedded into Canvas, I would be happy to use it again," he said.
Though Turnitin could serve as a useful resource to professors in the future, it does not catch every form of cheating, Sobel said. The software is only designed to catch plagiarism in written work, and even then it cannot detect situations in which students simply rephrase ideas from a primary source, he added.
Non-writing courses have adopted their own technologies to enforce academic honesty. The computer science department uses the Measure of Software Similarity, a tool that detects cases of collaboration among students in writing computer programs, Doeppner said, adding that the software has been very successful.
Beyond using advanced technological tools, professors have still had to manually detect more subtle cases of plagiarism and collaboration, Sobel said. Intuition remains the most prevalent and effective detection method for faculty, he added.
"The giveaway is when the writing style is different from the rest of the text," Lassonde added. "Faculty can Google the sentence, and something pops up."
While new tools are helpful in enforcing academic honesty, other structural changes are necessary to reduce cheating, Lassonde said. Publicizing particular cases of cheating and related punishments would help students be more cognizant of its consequences, he said.
"Students come to Brown with different expectations about cheating," Lassonde said. "We need to better educate students about plagiarism, and faculty should set clear guidelines about what constitutes cheating."
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