Sigh, here we go again. It’s time to look at what some students have done (a possible case of plagiarism), try to decide if I should make an official case of the whole thing and send it to the Disciplinary Board, or just tell them to avoid doing this again. Every so often I get the feeling that they time these things deliberately, just so I have more to do when I’m already really busy.

But these things make me sad. Allow me to explain: One part of my job is to handle all cheating cases at my department. This means that:

  • I need to get the course responsible teacher to lay out what has happened in a way so that I understand what has happened.
  • review the evidence,
  • interview the students, and get their explanation of what has happened,
  • decide if this is a case of actual cheating or just some kind of mistake,
  • in some cases, document what has happened and hand it over to the Disciplinary Board.

What makes me sad is that the students don’t seem to understand the consequences of being discovered cheating. During my interviews, they usually explain the entire thing with “We were collaborating to finish the assignment before the deadline, then we made individual solutions based on our discussions”. These individual solutions frequently contain the same texts with the same formatting, the same spelling errors, code that is all but identical, solution design that are exact copies of each other, etc., etc. In short, to meet the deadline, they take the decision to cheat. But they fail to consider the following:

  • The university-wide rule is that you can do every test three times, this includes assignments, written exams, or anything else that is a part of the examination. This means that they can just say, “Opps, I can’t hand in this before the deadline. OK, I do as much as I can, and then finish it before the next deadline”.
  • If they get caught cheating, they will be temporarily suspended from any kind of course work at the university. This might result in missing exams, missing a whole course, missing assignments, etc., etc. This in turn will affect the number of “course points” (ECT) they get, and this might have consequences for student loans, etc. It might also influence if they can follow the suggested course work for their program, or if they have to wait a year before being able to complete a course. All this can delay their graduation!! In short, a minor problem suddenly coursed some real problems for the students.

So, while the sentencing might seem “lax”, the ripple effect might cause real difficulties in the future. Fortunately, this is a worst-case scenario, the usual result is that they will be temporarily suspended, and then they have to do spend extra time catching up.

And yes, we try to explain these things to the students, but unfortunately not all of them seem to listen/understand.