學生集體作弊時 學校怎麼辦/ 哈佛部分涉嫌作弊學生選擇休學

哈佛部分涉嫌作弊學生選擇休學

RICHARD PÉREZ-PEÑA 報道 2012年09月13日

據知情人士透露，在學校校務和財務的截止日即將到來之際，哈佛大學一些身陷作弊醜聞的學生為了避免可能受到的停學一年處分，而決定主動選擇休學。
哈佛大學的管理人員拒絕證實或否認《體育畫報》在周二的一篇報道。該報道稱，該大學的籃球明星凱爾·凱西(Kyle Casey)也是休學學生里的一員。目前無法聯繫採訪到他本人。哈佛大學不願透露已經自願離校學生的人數，也不願透露其中有多少是學校校隊運動員。

H. Rumph Jr/Associated Press

哈佛大學部分涉嫌作弊的學生已休學，其中包括該校籃球明星凱爾·凱西。

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對本科生來說，周二本是他們可以在不需支付任何學費的情況下，選擇休學的最後一天，不過他們仍需承擔幾百美元的雜費、住宿費、伙食費。但是哈佛大學公布的校歷卻錯誤地標明星期三才是截止日期，所以哈佛大學的官員們表示，也接受在那天提出的免學費休學申請。
另外，周二還是學生註冊這學期課程的最後一天。這學期的課程已於一周前已經開始。
8月30日，哈佛大學宣布正在就一起作弊案進行調查，該案涉及了某門本科課程中將近一半的學生，他們在該課程春季學期可在家完成的期末考試中，涉嫌 協作答卷或抄襲，因而被指“學術欺詐”。哈佛大學不願意透露這門課程的具體信息，但是幾名被指控的學生表示這是一門叫做“國會概論”的政府研究課程，共有 279名學生修讀。這意味着有遠超過100名學生存在作弊嫌疑，是該校歷史上最嚴重的作弊事件。
學生們表示，這門課因為學習輕鬆又容易得高分而頗受好評，並且有相當數量的學生運動員為了給運動騰出時間而修這門課。但出於不明原因，他們說教授這門課的助理教授馬修·B·普拉特(Matthew B. Platt)去年把這門課的難度提高了不少。
如此，檢查每一個學生的考試並做出判斷的重任就落到了哈佛大學管理委員會(Harvard College Administrative Board)的肩上，這項工作預計會耗時數月。
一些學生在上周接受採訪時說，他們能夠寫出近乎一致的答案是因為他們互相之間共享了課堂筆記，或者是得到了研究生助教的幫助，而他們以為，這是被允許的。其他人則將其歸因於與其他同學的合作，雖然考試須知中明確規定此類行為違規，但據說這樣的做法得到廣泛接受。
哈佛大學校規對作弊行為一系列的懲罰措施，其中最嚴重的是勒令停學一年。然而對於學校校隊的運動員們來說，他們還需承擔額外的風險。因為一名運動員 為學校比賽的資格最多只有四年。如果一名運動員參加了比賽，接着就被停學一年的話，那就會用掉其中的一年，哪怕只進行了一場比賽。但是如果在為學校參加比 賽之前被停學的話，他的資格則可以往後順延一年。
據哈佛大學的一名管理人員和一名曾和部分離校學生進行溝通運動員稱，截止目前，不少處於被調查狀態的學生已經選擇了休學或有此計劃。這名學生透露，離校的學生中有一些是運動員。
由於上述二人提及的情況被哈佛大學認定為機密內容，在這裡對他們進行匿名處理。
在2005年到2010年間，平均每年有17名學生由於學術欺詐行為被勒令離校。而每年因為各種原因選擇自願離校的學生人數則超過200人。

翻譯：葉凡非

Harvard Cheating Scandal: Is Academic Dishonesty on the Rise?

In order to better understand what leads students to cheat, colleges and universities need to break the code of silence and apply their own academic methods to the problem

By Erika Christakis and Nicholas A. Christakis | September 4, 2012 | 

Brian Snyder / Reuters

Harvard University’s announcement last week of an investigation into a case of widespread cheating offered a little thrill of schadenfreude for some: confirmation, perhaps, that a venerable 376-year-old institution — whose motto, “Veritas,” means truth in Latin — could be caught up in the same pedestrian crimes and misdemeanors found at less lofty altitudes. According to reports in the Harvard Crimson, more than 100 students in an undergraduate lecture class are alleged to have lifted material from shared study guides on a final take-home exam.
(MORE: Campus Scandals and College Admissions: What Applicants Should Know)
Moral indignation is an understandable response, and can have a role in all sorts of problems. But focusing on individual character flaws or moral failings obscures both the magnitude and the complexity of the problem of our national crisis of academic dishonesty. Cheating cuts to the very heart of academia, more so than it does other institutions that have faced similar wrongdoing, such as professional sports and the financial industry, because the search for truth is the primary mission of a university. Harvard’s public statement promised appropriate discipline for the wrongdoers and noted that the “vast majority” of its students do their own work. Such circumstances — which are dismayingly common on college and high school campuses nationwide — often prompt institutions to reassert community values in this way. But a broader kind of soul searching is required.
Students have cheated for as long as there have been schools, but by any measure, academic dishonesty is on the rise. While detection methods and increased vigilance explain some of this increase, most experts believe the incidence of the forms of cheating has increased (PDF) too. For one thing, the technological ease of mashup culture can make it hard for students to recognize — or care — that they are appropriating the work of others. In fact, according to reporting in the New York Times, some of the Harvard students involved seemed to think that they didn’t really cheat, that there were special circumstances in the class, that the professor changed the rules and so on.
(MORE: Why Are We Depriving Our Teens of Sleep?)
Our experience at Harvard College as house masters of one of the 12 undergraduate residential-academic communities gives us a bird’s-eye view of the pressures that can drive students to temptation. We’ve observed two types of students who are especially vulnerable.
The first type is prone to panic and self-doubt. Feeling the weight of family or societal expectations, these students become so worried about failure that they lose perspective and fail to see obvious alternatives to cheating like asking for help before things get out of control, making up a failed class over the summer, taking time off, being honest with their parents or learning to cope with a plan B. Because of their youth and immaturity, these students don’t realize that bombing a class isn’t a permanent blot on their record as a human being and will not likely affect their long-term capacity to find a job or get into graduate school. The tunnel vision of late adolescence, which can be so energizing in other arenas, takes on a toxicity that inhibits resilience in the face of disappointment.
The second type of student at risk for cheating belongs to one or more social networks like fraternities, “final clubs,” athletic teams or cultural-affinity groups, where barriers to cheating (like social opprobrium) are lower and the logistic means to cheat (like sharing study materials) is more common. Membership in these networks often comes with a high degree of loyalty and social pressure to perpetuate cheating or protect cheaters from discovery. In fact, there is evidence that peer attitudes to cheating help predict who will engage in academic dishonesty.
(MORE: Should We Stop Telling Our Kids That They’re Special?)
But on some level, everyone is at risk for academic dishonesty, no matter who or where they are. Nowadays, we seem to live in a culture of lies. Should we really be surprised that high schoolers cheat on standardized tests when they grow up among adults — Olympic cyclists, politicians, money managers, high school administrators, journalists, professors and even their own parents — who may be thrifty, at best, with the truth? It doesn’t help to whisk away such a widespread phenomenon by dividing the world into good and bad people or insisting that the whole business is simply beyond our control.
The right response to cheating involves not just adjudicating the individual cases but also exploring and addressing the structural determinants and risk factors for academic dishonesty. For guidance, academic institutions can look within their own community. Many scholars are already at the vanguard of understanding how decent people fall prey to the pressures of groupthink and poor decisionmaking. For example, Dan Ariely, a behavioral economist at Duke University, describes some of the science behind the contagion of cheating norms in his recent book, The (Honest) Truth About Dishonesty. We need to learn more about the learning environments that either promote or inhibit academic integrity.
(MORE: Penn State Cover-Up: Groupthink in Action)
As with any epidemiological study that addresses risk factors, people may not like the results. But we should embrace, not fear, these kinds of findings. They may shine light on dysfunctional social and academic practices that are in need of change, but educators and students nationwide need to engage in this difficult self-reflection.
It will be a real test of Veritas.

Read more: http://ideas.time.com/2012/09/04/harvard-cheating-scandal-is-academic-dishonesty-on-the-rise/#ixzz26Dlf8qlW