Email from Scott Baden on Student Cheating

Date: Sun, 28 Jan 2001 13:19:57 -0800
From: "Scott B. Baden" <baden@cs.ucsd.edu>
Organization: CSE Dept., University of California, San Diego
X-Accept-Language: en
To: Joseph Goguen <goguen@cs.ucsd.edu>
CC: ggillespie@ucsd.edu, wgg@cs.ucsd.edu
Subject: Academic Dishonesty


You can tell the students is that they should consider that cheating has a
demoralizing effect on the faculty which increases the level of mistrust.  It
also adds to our workload: the time taken to deal with cheating cases, the
time to deal with preventive measures, e.g. the need to rewrite problem sets
and questions each course offering.  Students sometimes wonder why we aren't
as accessible as they like.  Cheating contributes to this problem (though it
certainly isn't the only issue).  Of course, there is always the
disappointement that students choose to use someone else's work rather than
come to the faculty member, or to even bring up the problem.  In the end this
results is a lot of stress on the job.

Teaching raises a major contradiction, and cheating is one instance of the
problem.  The instructor's goal is to enhance the learning process, and
grades are a mechanism to meet these goals.  The grades are therefore a means
of an end.  For students, the grades can be the means itself, esp. those that
cheat.

Scott