With Honor

The preliminary results of a survey conducted by campus administrators this spring indicate nearly half of Duke undergraduates have cheated or knowingly committed other acts that violate the campus honor code, prompting President Nannerl O. Keohane to challenge students and faculty to work toward a stronger honor code culture.

Speaking at a forum Wednesday afternoon at the Sanford Institute of Public Policy, Keohane said, "It is a personal commitment of mine, and a very strong priority, to do what we can to focus the discussion of honor at Duke in a way that will be productive for our students and our faculty members in the months and years ahead. ... This is part of a larger set of discussions, and we hope that people will follow the various conversations with interest because we know that they will be cumulative and we hope they will lead to some very good results."

The eight-page report, released this week by the Duke University Academic Integrity Assessment Committee, focused on the responses of 242 students to a survey sent by e-mail this spring to 400 seniors, juniors and sophomores. Early results from a similar survey of 200 regular-rank faculty were also released.

Forty-five percent of the students who responded to the survey admitted to "unauthorized collaboration" during their time at Duke. Nearly as many, 38.5 percent, acknowledged they had copied "a few sentences without footnoting them in a paper," while 37 percent confessed to "falsifying lab or research data."

Almost one quarter of the surveyed students, 24 percent, said they had gotten "questions or answers from someone who has already taken test," and 21 percent admitted "receiving substantial, unpermitted help" on an assignment.

Other acts of academic dishonesty that students divulged included "fabricating or falsifying a bibliography" (19 percent); plagiarism (11 percent); "copying from another student during a test/exam without their knowledge (11 percent); and "helping someone else cheat on a test" (8 percent).

Duke is one of 12 colleges and universities participating in a pilot project this year, "Assessing Academic Integrity," funded by the John Templeton Foundation. The project is being led by the Center for Academic Integrity, a national consortium of 200 schools based at Duke and affiliated with the Kenan Ethics Program.

Twenty schools, including Duke, took part in the survey phase of the project. Previous surveys were conducted at Duke in 1990 and 1995 as part of a national review of student academic integrity led by Rutgers University professor Donald McCabe, a nationally known researcher in the field and the principal investigator for the ongoing study.

Twenty-seven percent of the undergraduates surveyed said they had seen another student cheat on a test or exam at Duke. But only 2 percent said they had ever reported incidents of cheating and 66 percent rated the chances of getting caught for cheating at Duke as "low" or "very low."

Several of the surveyed students called for strengthening education efforts concerning Duke's honor code in a special section permitting written comments.

"The single most effective method of cheating prevention is the clear presentation by the professor in each and every course of the integrity standards expected for the work to be done," wrote one student.

Other students faulted the competitive academic atmosphere on campus. "If you don't want cheating to go on here at Duke, you should work to have a more cooperative rather than competitive environment," a student wrote.

Only 48 percent of the 200 faculty surveyed had responded by the time the report was compiled, but the preliminary results revealed a wide belief that few on campus understand Duke's policy on student cheating. The professors stated they believed 63 percent of students had a "low" or "very low" understanding of policies concerning cheating. They were even harder on themselves, rating 72 percent of the faculty's understanding at "low/very low."

While 59.5 percent of the faculty rated their support for the campus cheating policies as "high/very high," the campus lagged behind a 1999 survey of steps taken by faculty at 20 other schools to prevent instances of academic dishonesty.

Fifty-four percent of the Duke faculty respondents stated that they changed exams regularly, compared to 72 percent at private schools with honor codes, 82 percent at public schools with honor codes and 79 percent at schools with no honor code.

Thirty-five percent of Duke professors surveyed stated they discussed the importance of integrity with their students, compared to 58 percent of the private school faculty in the 1999 survey. And while 35 percent of Duke faculty respondents stated they reminded the students about their obligations, 63 percent of their private school counterparts said they had in the earlier survey.

In discussing the survey on Wednesday, Keohane said the results can be viewed one of two ways: "Either you can be optimistic and say things may not be in such a bad shape because we're not 'a serious honor code school' and yet we don't have as much cheating as some other schools in that batch. Or you can say, on the other hand, that Duke is an honor code school, at least formally because we have adopted an honor code, and our behavior doesn't live up to the standards as that set by other schools which have had an honor code for much longer ...

"We're kind of betwixt and between, and when one is in a betwixt-and-between situation, it is very often an unstable equilibrium. I happen to believe that is true at Duke today, that if we don't take concerted efforts together to focus on commitment to honor, there are many pressures

that may lead us to backslide and to move away from even the positions where we are today."Echoing comments she made in an editorial in this week's Chronicle, Keohane said, "If you cheat, it is really true that you are cheating yourself because you're here for an education.

"If you think all that matters is the results and the grades, then as an engineer someday when you start to build a bridge, or as a surgeon when you start to take on brain surgery, when you're a lawyer and you start crafting a document to keep your client out of jail, it's not going to do much good that you knew what the right answer was if you don't know how to get there.

"That may seem a long way in the future, but it's a habit of mind that you form for yourself ... The notion that the rest of the world is filled with cheaters who always get away with it, I think, is a very superficial and fundamentally wrong-headed notion because our world depends on professionals and colleagues who don't cheat, who know how to get results, and all of us live by that everyday."