Everything I Needed To Know I Learned In Expos (Or Did I?)
In Arthur Miller’s The Crucible, John Putnam extols the value of his name, telling others that he can’t let dishonesty tarnish his stellar reputation. In the crucible of academic pressure that exists at Harvard, however, many students put their names on the line every semester in the interest of making the grade. Many would argue that they don’t even have the chance to keep their shreds of honesty, as Harvard doesn’t always do a good job making it clear what acts count as an academic transgression.
First-years learn the ins and outs of only one kind of academic cheating. Says Assistant Dean of the College David B. Fithian, the secretary of the Administrative Board, “As you know, each Expos class should spend at least one session or more discussing how to improve students’ usage of source material and their ability to use citations correctly.”
But at Harvard a lot of cheating goes on in classes where papers are not involved. Several computer science teaching fellows told FM that every year a sizable chunk of the students who are forced to take a year’s leave of absence come from the CS department. And in Science Cores and introductory economics classes many students say they leisurely copy homework assignments without thinking of their actions as actual cheating. There is a lack of knowledge about the definition of cheating on campus, and that ignorance—as students who have been Ad-Boarded can attest—proves to be quite dangerous.
Many students who cheat in humanities classes say that they know exactly what they are doing. We revisit Luke. Luke admits that, as a first-year at Harvard, he constantly engaged in cheating with his roommates. “It’s sort of amazing to me sometimes how easy it is to get away with stuff in Harvard exams,” Luke says. “There’ll be 300 people in a single room, and only four little people in the front looking for cheaters. When you’re taking those big freshmen classes, it just becomes so easy to scribble a few things in a blue book and then place it on the empty seat between you and your roommate. If the roommate waits long enough to pick it up, he’ll never get caught.”
Luke is like many of Harvard’s academic cheaters, who admitted to romantic cheating after being contacted for an interview just on academics. With that in mind, listen to what Luke has to say about his belief that in many cases his interests are important enough to justify bending the rules.
“I sometimes think I should feel bad, but honestly the way they work us here, I don’t think there’s anything wrong with it,” he says. “I think you pick and choose the rules that should apply to you in some cases, and in this case, I just think we can’t be expected to learn all this stuff.”
Luke’s attitude toward the rules was echoed by another student who cheated in his first year, Bobby. Bobby, who is now a junior, has a weakness, and that weakness is Español. After weeks and months of suffering through homework that took him hours and was hopelessly incorrect, Bobby decided to have his roommate do his homework for him. “I was basically just trying not to fail, and I justified my cheating by the fact that I thought it was a dumb requirement,” Bobby says. “It’s really easy to rationalize as well because you know a lot of people do it, and in the end, it’s victimless.”
Those who engage in a more profound sort of cheating become their own victims. Jacob, a student who was forced to take a year off from school after he was Ad-Boarded for turning in a sophomore literature paper that he copied off the Internet, says he always knew he was completely culpable.
“It was bad, I admit, but I never realized I’d get caught,” says Jacob, who ultimately graduated in 2001. “My roommates knew that I was cheating, too, and that was the real problem.”
Jacob says his roommate had a sense of a “culture of honor” at Harvard, and decided to turn Jacob in to his senior tutor when it became apparent that the literature professor was not going to detect his indiscretion.
“My roommate had begun to hate me because I was doing a lot of coke all the time in that room,” Jacob says. “It angered me, though, because even though I was honest, the entire proceeding was filled with dishonesty. My senior tutor denied to me that my roommate was the one who turned me in, and it wasn’t until years later that I found out who was responsible. That sort of dishonesty has angered me for years.”
When academic transgressions occur in non-humanities fields, many students say that it becomes much more difficult to determine the line between what is permissible and what can’t be accepted. According to Fithian, professors and TFs have the responsibility of making policies clear when the students aren’t dealing with traditional paper-writing plagiarism. But many students say that policies in some Core courses are far from clear.
“I’m taking a QR class right now,” says Tobenna D. Anekwe ’03. “And to be honest, I have no idea whether we are allowed to work together on problem sets or not.”
One student, Manny, who was forced to take a year off for academic dishonesty, says it was this exact sort of confusion that came into play in his case. When Manny was a sophomore he took a Science Core, and one week he cheated on a problem set—the sort of assignment that would only count as a check-plus or check-minus—by simply copying a few answers from a friend who sent him her problem set in an e-mail. Within a few days of turning it in, Manny found himself before the Ad Board, and soon he was forced to take a year off.
“I knew that I was cheating when I did it, I guess, but to me it seemed all right as a one-time thing, since this was just a Core class,” Manny says. “All this problem set was doing was helping me to prepare for the final. The whole issue really doesn’t make much sense to me to this day.”
For many students the idea of leaving school for a year for copying a single problem set seems ridiculous.
“That’s unbelievable to me,” says Nina, who is currently a junior. “I took ‘History of Life’ and I don’t think I ever did a single problem set. And when you take Ec 10, everybody just sort of congregates in the Science Center and copies each other’s work. I’d say I copied maybe eight of the 10 problem sets for that course.”
Harpaul A. Kohli ’02-’03, president of the Physics Club, says that in many non-humanities courses, students usually know the cheating policy based on the culture of the department. Kohli says that in the math department, students are encouraged to work together “almost to the point of sharing answers.” But this ultimately is a function of the way departments like math and physics handle the curve.
“In the math department, there is no fixed grading system, so everyone is in it together,” Kohli says. “In the math department, if everyone does well, no one does worse, and that culture of trust really encourages less cheating and more collaboration.”
In departments like computer science, however, students are told frankly that any sort of collaboration will not be accepted. CS 50, in fact, is notorious for using a program that checks student problem sets for cheating, and results in a high number of students who are kicked out.
But even when math and science departments have clear policies on cheating, academic dishonesty in these departments is somehow still harder to pinpoint. Often there really is only one way to solve a math or physics problem, and professors are unable to prove cheating when students have duplicate answers. But this was not true in the case of Jennie C. Lin ’03. When Lin was a first-year, someone in an organic chemistry course copied her work during a midterm. Her creatively incorrect answers immediately gave the cheater away. Lin recounts the story of the professor calling her one morning and thanking her for her ineptitude. “He told me that if I had answered everything correctly there’s no way he would have ever known,” says Lin, who now studies English. But the entire situation changed the way Lin understood cheating at Harvard.
“Cheating is one of those things I always romanticized as acts of desperation, and it seemed like everyone around me was pretty damn smart already without cheating,” Lin says. “In high school, someone’s always walking around telling you to cover up your test with your arm, but here the testing scene is pretty laid-back.”
If the definition of cheating remains unclear, students say the Ad Board does not deal with cases of academic dishonesty in a nuanced way. For students like Manny, this issue is especially biting. “I remember when I was preparing for my case I was looking through student handbooks trying to see if there were any loopholes for cases like mine,” Manny says. “What really struck me, though, was just how unfair it seemed that students who cheated in cases like mine, and students who plagiarized their thesis, and even students who at that point committed a rape would receive the same punishment as I did. To me that seems completely unfair.”
In the current Undergraduate Council presidential election, Rohit Chopra ’04 is running on a platform that includes pushing for student presence on the Ad Board. Manny, when he hears of this proposal, says he doesn’t think such a thing would ever be productive in any sense, as he “wouldn’t want kids who are tight with the administration looking at student cases.”
Fithian, who says he often hears discussion of adding a student member to the Ad Board, seems to offer a similar prognosis. “I’ve talked to others of my colleagues at schools with honor codes and my sense is that often students are harsher on their peers,” Fithian says. “At UVA, for instance, if you cheat at all, you’re usually out. Our sense is that sometimes when it comes to cheating, good people make mistakes. We don’t believe that most students that are caught cheating are irredeemable.”
