Northwestern's policy makes it technically breach of contract if faculty members discover an incident of academic misconduct and try to handle it themselves rather than refer it immediately to the Dean's office. I like this idea so much more than Wisconsin's policy, which required you first to meet one-on-one with the student and only pass it forward if you intended to implement any punishment. An interesting twist is that if a lecturer or junior faculty member at Northwestern and tried to handle it The Wisconsin Way, the student could turn around and try to blackmail the teacher for their misconduct-misconduct.
First incident of undergraduate plagiarism that I had at Wisconsin involved a class where the TA caught the student. I don't remember if this was the case where the undergrad's reference to their "35 years of experience in the field" was the giveaway that perhaps the student had not written the text in question, or the one whose paper included "(see map on page 537)." Anyway, the TA was convinced this was an anomalous experience. "Good student; sociology major" he said, more than once.* I had to meet with her and she had a story for how some emergency had happened and she was scared about turning in the assignment late and so took something quick off the Internet. I believed her. After all, she looked really remoseful and scared. But there was another assignment out and ten seconds of Googling revealed that one to be plagiarized as well. Turns out, she had even been lying about being a sociology major.**
* No, I didn't really understand why the idea of her being a sociology major was supposed to make her less like to commit misconduct, either.
** All that evidence that people in positions of authority aren't any better at detecting when people are lying, but they do believe that they are: you don't believe it applies to you until confronted with the fact that it does.
3 comments:
My school has a similar policy: go straight to the Honors Board, and have them sort it out. In general, I dislike taking away the authority of faculty to determine the interaction, but on the other hand a prof has no way of knowing if it is the first or 11th breach, and no longer has to worry about being a disciplinarian. My rule of thumb: proper use of semi-colons, and a mixture of 'smart' and 'dumb' quotes are reason for a little Googling...
I think the idea is less that sociology students are less likely to commit misconduct, but that students taking a class within their own major are less likely to commit misconduct. This is based on the premise that misconduct is primarily a way to get through classes one is uninterested in with minimal effort. Of course, this idea also presumes that sociology students are interested in all of the sociology classes they take. Either of these premises could/is likely to be false.
I wish I didn't have to meet with my students. I, too, have to do face-to-face meetings. Given that I have the giant Intro course, I had 3 such meetings last year. The stressfulness-to-usefulness ratio of the meetings seems way too high.
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