REGULATING COLLABORATION

In the wake of the scandal, there has been a call for faculty as well as students to foster a regulated type of collaboration and lay out the rules governing a class’s take on academic integrity in the spirit of what Smith had described.

Harris told The Crimson in an email that the request that faculty communicate their collaboration policies on their syllabi was approved “to reduce ambiguity.”

“The more information provided to students about expectations, the less likely they will accidentally run afoul of the policy in any class,” Harris wrote.

According to Harris, “a significantly increased portion” of faculty have included collaboration policy statements on their syllabi or websites this past year. Some professors further explicated their rules governing collaboration while giving their first lectures during shopping week while others emphasized the guidelines whenever passing out major assignments throughout the year.

Philosophy professor Edward J. Hall devoted almost an entire page of the syllabus for his class Philosophy 151z: “Philosophy of Quantum Mechanics” to explaining his collaboration policy this spring. His reason for doing so, reads his syllabus, was “the Notorious Cheating Scandal of 2012.”

Hall said he thinks a well-defined collaboration policy could help students better understand what is expected in terms of collaboration.

Students say that in the aftermath of the cheating scandal, they have noticed faculty’s policies governing collaboration becoming more specific and, in general, more clear.

Mariel N. Pettee ’14, a math and physics concentrator, said she has seen a change in her professors’ approach to collaboration policies, citing the final take-home exam for Mathematics 136: “Differential Geometry” as an example of rules being explicitly defined. Pettee said she appreciated that the professor in that class told her that for the test, “‘You could use any of your notes, your textbooks, you can also use resources on the internet if you need to—you just can’t collaborate with each other.’”

Still, the cheating scandal and the increasingly explicit nature of academic integrity statements on syllabi have left a small portion of students anxious about breaking policy, regardless of any intention to cheat.

The student implicated in the cheating scandal wrote that he is now afraid to collaborate at all for fear of being accused of cheating and facing the Ad Board again.

Robert T. Bowden ’13, who this year was the head teaching fellow for Computer Science 50: “Introduction to Computer Science” and has been a member of the class’s teaching staff in the past, said this fall he noticed some students worrying more about following collaboration policies in the aftermath of the cheating scandal.

Bowden said he also observed this trend when he was a TF for Computer Science 161: “Operating Systems” this spring. The class administered a take-home exam that prohibited students from using the Internet to answer questions, but allowed them to do things like check their email so long as their discussions were not about the test. Bowden recalled one student who was so concerned with following the rules that he emailed asking if it was in accordance with the policy to have sent his mother a Facebook message while taking the exam.

Administrators say the push to clarify policies governing academic integrity was not meant to place every type of collaboration under scrutiny.

Harris told The Crimson in an email that the administration did not want to “curtail collaboration where it is appropriate.”