Don't Cheat

In looking at student responses to problem sets, the teaching assistants and I often notice, especially early in the semester, that answers from two students look remarkably similar.

Of course, we encourage students to discuss the problems with one another and with us, and many problems do have a best answer.

But when students use identical turns of phrase, or make the same conceptual errors and the same mathematical errors, it becomes hard to believe that they did the work completely independently of one another.

During conceptual check offs, we often find that one student may have an excellent grasp of the material, and the other student, even though he or she has almost identical answers, really doesn't understand the material and can't answer the questions.

Similarly, on the unit quizzes, one student may be able to answer the questions effortlessly, and the other consistently gets them wrong.

When this happens, it is clear that one student has gotten the answers from the other student, with or without the other student's permission.

If we observe this happening, we often speak to each student individually.

We point out to the stronger student that if another student is asking for answers, it is fine to give them suggestions and guidance, but it is not acceptable to allow them to copy directly; by doing so, the stronger student is preventing the weaker student from really learning the material.

When we meet with the weaker student, we often ask him or her to do the simple tasks that they should have been able to master if he or she had done the work himself or herself, and not copied it from someone else.

The weaker student is usually completely unable to solve the problem on his or her own.

Similarly, we sometimes see that Term Paper Proposals or Benchmarks have material in them that was directly copied from another student, or from Wikipedia, or from a published paper.

If you use someone else's text, even if you provide a citation to the source, you are plagiarizing if you merely paraphrase the words.

You must put someone else's words in quotation marks to indicate that they are not yours.

If we ask the student to explain the material in the text that was copied, he or she usually has great difficulty explaining it.

We then point out to the student that the consequences of cheating are very serious.

The instructors know the material well; the student from whom the weaker student copied knows the material well; or the original scholar from whom the student copied text knows the material; but by taking a short cut, he or she has cheated himself or herself out of the chance to really learn the material.

You are the one who ultimately needs to be able to demonstrate that you understand the material in this course.

If you take short cuts like having someone else work on your benchmark problems, copying someone else's answers, copying text that someone else wrote, whether from the class, from Wikipedia, or from somewhere else, or having someone else write text for you, you are cheating yourself of the opportunity to really learn the material yourself.

Because we will talk to you in each class as we check you off on the benchmark problems, and we will see how you think about and discuss material in the class, we will have a good idea of whether you really understand the material or not, and your final grade will reflect this.

We also carefully read Benchmarks and the Term Paper, and if text is plagiarized, you will receive a zero for that assignment, which may mean that you will fail the course entirely.

We have unfortunately repeatedly caught students who ignore these warnings.

Because all infractions must be reported to the Academic Integrity Board, student who do this will now have permanent records of having cheated, which damages their long term prospects for getting into good medical or graduate schools, or staying in a medical school or graduate school program.

Summary:

Don't cheat; if you do, you will be cheating yourself, and we will almost certainly catch you.