The Social Danger in Allowing Academic Dishonesty to Fester

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The fall from grace of Harvard’s president Claudine Gay has opened a wide-running discussion of academic integrity at our major colleges. If the president of one of the most venerable universities in America, if not the world, had plagiarized her way into prominence, how did this reflect generally on higher education?

One of the people who had pressed for Gay’s ouster was Bill Ackman. Then, after Business Insider accused Ackman’s wife of plagiarizing her dissertation, Ackman threatened a plagiarism review of faculty and administrators at M.I.T. Since then, there have been calls to find out just how widespread academic dishonesty is among the intellectual elites with the help of AI.

I have been following this closely because it is an area where I have some experience. On three occasions I was called upon to revise my former college’s Honor Code and the procedures used for identifying plagiarism and other forms of cheating. This led me to a fairly extensive study of how various schools address academic dishonesty.

Over the years I found that there were some faculty who saw cheating as a problem; others were in denial. Although it was clear that most students were honest, there was a small but not insignificant group that was not.

Through research and experience adjudicating cases of cheating I noted three distinct classes of academic dishonesty. First were the casual errors – failure to cite properly. More often than not these derived from ignorance of accepted standards. Hardly any students come out of high school knowing how to cite their sources. And, in my experience, many college faculty are too lazy to teach them. The reality is that every student needs to learn the standards appropriate to their discipline (MLA, APA, Chicago, etc.). A friend calls this “disciplinary piety” – in any given field it is necessary to learn and respect the forms. Scholars who have been properly drilled in the forms cite out of habit. It is not something they have to think about doing; conscientious scholars hit the “insert footnote” tab automatically by instinct. The second class are panic cheaters. This is where most cases of plagiarism fall: Students wait until the last minute to write a paper and then start Googling. One of my favorite cases was a student who turned in an essay in a gen ed course in which the phrase “property of the paper store” appeared frequently in the middle of the text – very sloppy cut and paste job.

Even without AI, these cases are easy to spot. When one is reading the usual undergraduate word salad and then comes across a passage in lush Victorian prose, suspicions are raised. A quick internet search of a short passage usually reveals the source within seconds. No AI required.

In my experience, these are brief moral lapses and generally, students prove contrite once caught. More serious are serial plagiarists. In these cases, the students feel no moral obligation to be honest. Sometimes it’s purely cynicism; in other cases darker forces are at work. The worst forms of cheating include coordinated activity – a parent paying for someone to write their kid’s paper for instance – or willful destruction of course materials or equipment. “Razoring” – cutting articles out of journals so other students can’t see them – used to be common at law schools. Here is one place where digitalization has made cheating more difficult.

A serial cheater plans out the dishonesty. They also persist in the behavior even when caught. The most egregious cases were in required courses, either gen ed or gateways courses in majors. Cheating was very common in composition, western civ, and general chemistry.

Serial cheaters generally placed little if any value on the life of the mind. They were in college to get certification, not to learn. Now I understand that this is a common view. Increasingly we see demands that all college curricula should be focused on “marketable” skills. To that I would say that Adam Smith strongly disagreed with that sentiment. Especially when it comes to required courses, the average student does the work mainly in the spirit of simply getting it over with. Nevertheless, serial cheaters are driven by something other than mere sloth. They are driven by ambition and are disdainful of their instructors and classmates. The worst offenders exhibit sociopathic tendencies.

The dedicated cheaters were often harder to catch because, like all sociopaths, they were very comfortable being dishonest. Lying was their first response in any given situation. Stealing papers from roommates, stealing data from lab partners, fudging data – everything was fair game. Serial cheaters tended to congregate in pre-professional majors. Several of the worst I know of (who avoided getting caught) are now attorneys and doctors. The combination of ambition and disdain for ordinary moral standards – a Machiavellian world view – served them well. And in my experience some of them enjoy trying to game the system. They revel in the thrill of the chase. This brings me to the issue of AI. I am familiar with various programs used to catch plagiarism. Reading the data is something of an art but look at enough cases (and I have reviewed thousands) and you get a feel for what is and what is not serious plagiarism.

The programs look for matches with other papers in the databases. A properly researched and cited paper will not, however, register zero matches. On the contrary, because of citation conventions (footnotes, bibliography) a good paper should have a match rate of at least 10%.

The concern arises once the match rate exceeds 15%. Now that may be because the author includes lots of long quotes (that no one ever reads – I mean, what do YOU do when you come across a long block quote in a text?). Bad student papers are often nothing more than a run of undigested quotes from the readings stuck together with little analysis. In those instances, we are dealing with sloth rather than complex sins of fraud.

This is where the case of Neri Oxman, Bill Ackman’s wife, is interesting. Accused of having plagiarized part of her dissertation she admitted to having left out quotation marks in four paragraphs. Was this intentional dishonesty or simply sloppy editing? Most scholars I know would freely admit to having made similar lapses at some point in their writing. Carelessness is different from plagiarism. Here is where one must consider the extent of the borrowing.

If 20-30% of a paper matches others in the database, we can see the line being crossed from carelessness or sloth to genuine academic dishonesty. Anything above 30% is almost certainly intentional plagiarism. Even so, establishing intent is tricky. This is where the human eye is essential. Extended passages lifted without proper citation, attempts to scramble words or break up long quotations to make them “appear” to be original writing are all indications of fraudulent intent. One would like to think that cheating is something educators would like to eliminate. A former colleague described how in his time at Washington and Lee University, cheaters would be stuck in a cab bound for the train station, never to return. That sort of thing doesn’t happen nowadays, although some of the more draconian honor codes at women’s colleges come close. Unfortunately, academic dishonesty is not treated seriously enough. Many faculty flatter themselves, thinking that “their” students would never cheat. Administrators frequently do not support strong prosecution of cheating because they don’t want to offend the paying customers.

An obvious question is: who cares? Does cheating really hurt anyone? I would argue it does. If it is allowed to fester, academic dishonesty undermines student morale. Why work hard when the cheaters get ahead? Matters are made worse when some groups (athletes, for example) are not held to the same standards as everyone else. The essence of tyranny is arbitrary rule, and when rules are applied selectively and unevenly it intensifies the feeling that the game is rigged. When college and universities wink at academic dishonesty it breeds cynicism and disdain for the culture of higher education. Public confidence in education had declined dramatically. The revelations of wide-spread dishonesty at the highest levels has only increased popular suspicion of the university as one of the most prominent institutions in American life. I’ve heard faculty and administrators make apologies for academic dishonesty. Sometimes these apologies arise from the moral position of sympathy for the underdog (or undergrad). Less prepared or less privileged students cannot be held to the same standards. In some cases this makes sense – a student who has never been taught the basics citation is hardly to be blamed for gross errors. But serial plagiarists exploit the good will of the sort of people who are uncomfortable enforcing rules.

Others faculty and administrators make excuses because they fear the wrath of parents and advocacy groups. I have no sympathy for such folk. In loco parentis doesn’t mean coddling entitled brats. The academic enterprise is supposed to build up character – that is the original meaning of “edification” (aedificatio). Sniffing at academic dishonesty does the opposite. The sort of people who cheat as undergrads continue to do so. And the effects can be seen not only in the academy, but in business and politics.

There is a significant social danger in allowing academic dishonesty to fester. I can think of nothing worse for society than a leadership class full of sociopathic serial cheaters. Along with other events of the past decade, the recent scandal at Harvard suggests we are already there.