Professional Golfer Brian Davis was in the middle of a sudden death playoff with fellow golfer Jim Furyk when he barely struck some high weeds in his backswing. In golf, this constitutes a two stroke penalty, which in a playoff situation, would mean certain defeat. He immediately stopped and asked a rules official to confirm that he had actually hit the weeds. Once confirmed, he imposed the two stroke penalty on himself, as per the rules, and promptly lost the tournament. Mr. Davis has never won a tournament in his career and this was the closest he had ever come to winning. Not only did he surrender the victory, the loss also cost him $400k in prize money as well.

The game of golf has always promoted itself as being the leader in sports in the areas of sportsmanship and integrity. In the case of Brian Davis, I believe it would be hard to disagree.

What are your thoughts on Davis' decision? If you were on the edge of winning for the first time in your career, could you/would you impose a penalty on yourself if it were deserved?

Link to full article.

India news reports that AQ Khan, the father of the Pakistani nuclear program and generous donor of nuclear technology to rogue states like North Korea, Iran, and Libya, now stands accused of plagiarism. After being released earlier this year from house arrest, Khan began writing a column, "Random Thoughts," for various Pakistani newspapers.

A Pakistani doctoral student in computer engineering now alleges that some of Dr. Khan's random thoughts were actually gleaned verbatim from other published sources.
http://ibnlive.in.com/news/after-nuke-proliferation-a-q-khan-accused-of-plagiarism/100064-2.html

http://www.hackaday.com/2008/08/27/high-school-students-hacking-electronic-tests/
http://thedailywtf.com/Articles/When-In-Doubt,-Choose-C.aspx

The comments on the first one are... enlightening.
Yes, the second story is old and there are better systems available now, but the ideas are very relevant. (Excuse the site's acronym; they claim it stands for "Worse than Failure," not the other phrase WTF is an acronym for.)

Faculty of kindergarten classes all the way up to graduate-level course must realize that students are good with technology.  This will get better as those who learned to use computers in elementary school become teachers and professors.
I think students will always try to find a way to crack the system. Part of this is it’s sometimes quicker than completing the assignment legitimately. Part of it is the challenge. Tests are boring; thinking up ways to circumvent tests is more exciting to some students.
Teachers, instructors, and professors need to be aware of this and be vigilant and impress upon their students the importance of honest work. If there's an opportunity to cheat but the students have had the ideas of "honor" and "integrity" instilled upon them, they will be much less likely to commit academic misconduct.

This article is a response to an integrity survey conducted at OU in 2004.

In 2004, the University of Oklahoma, through the Provost's office, conducted an extensive online survey among faculty and students in an effort to determine the academic integrity environment at OU. The results of the survey show that on many measures, students at OU beat national averages; however that statement is a bit misleading. For example, when asked whether receiving un-permitted help on an assignment constituted cheating, only 17% felt that it was serious, 38% felt it was moderate, 31% felt it was trivial, and 14% of OU students surveyed felt it did not constitute cheating at all. The national results for the same question come back at 14%, 33%, 35%, and 18%, respectively. It is encouraging to think that students at OU responded to the question with better results than the national average, but it is very disheartening to think that 45% of all OU students surveyed felt that it was either trivial or not cheating.

It is important to recognize that many students responded to this survey with a decent level of integrity awareness, but those are not the students that concern the University of Oklahoma. Concern arises because many students are not sufficiently educated about the importance of academic integrity both in the classroom and out. Education is the key to solving the academic integrity issue. It's foolish to think that there will ever be 100% compliance; a cursory reading of Orwell's 1984 gives support to that, but improvement can still be made. In medicine, there are long-term benefits for prevention versus waiting for crisis to respond. Similarly, if we strive to educate students about academic integrity now, it will (hopefully) produce upright, honest, and integrity loving citizens in the future. Saying that education is necessary is one thing, but actually doing something about it is entirely different. Honor Council members talking to the Faculty Senate and at department meetings is important, but we need to do more.  That’s why I propose a list of initiatives that OU and the UOSA Honor Council can use to further educate the students at OU about academic integrity:

1. Start early and start heavy. Just like learning how to tie your shoes or read a book, its best to start young.  Only 3% of the students in the 2004 survey were freshmen. Increased exposure to freshmen is essential. Howdy Week and expo classes are two chances to improve visibility among freshmen.
2. Integrity Tutorial. The University has a requirement that all incoming students under the age of 22 watch a video and complete a quiz related to responsible alcohol use.  Making an academic integrity tutorial mandatory would help as well.
3. Involve OU Housing and the mandatory dorm year. Since all freshmen are required to live in the dorms the first year, taking advantage of a captive audience is essential. Initiate a program that RA's in the dorms can use in floor meetings to promote academic integrity.
4. The Daily. Thousands of students read the newspaper at OU every day. This past semester there were a handful of articles relating to academic integrity, let's take advantage of some free publicity and initiate a sit-down interview with the paper early in the fall 2008 semester.
5. The Greeks. We need to tap into the Greek community. Organize a meeting where a few members of the Honor Council meet with each house on campus.
6. The Academic Integrity Code. Students sign it on blue books, on exams, and on their university contract, but very few take it seriously. We need to give the code teeth and importance at OU. Unless students understand the importance of the academic code and recognize that there are consequences for not following it, the aforementioned suggestions are worthless.

This list is by no means exhaustive, nor is this article meant to be a criticism of the University. Rather, I think this should serve as a wake-up call. The numbers are out there that suggest that few students understand the importance of academic integrity - there is no excuse for academic misconduct, and ignorance of the laws cannot be an excuse. Our mission as an organization is to promote academic integrity at OU, and education is certainly a step in the right direction.

The Bangkok Post reports this week that cheating on religious exams is rampant among Buddhist monks in Thailand. The monks are required to pass examinations in Buddhist theology and Pali, the language of the "canon" (set of traditionally-accepted scriptures) in the South Asian Buddhist tradition. The report suggests that most monks are less interested in the scriptures than in completing their monastery-funded education, bailing out of the monastic life, and landing a secular job. Many monks simply fail to show up for the required exam, creating pressure on the proctors to show a decent pass rate among those who do. The report faults a combination of outdated curriculum, lack of genuine interest among novice monks, and institutional complicity in perpetuating a failed system.

[This guest blog from a former HC member is in response to a story about a student who is being accused of cheating via Facebook, a social networking web site.]

The question is, "How much help is too much?" Suppose a tutor, helping a student with a homework assignment, does one problem to show the student how, but student does not quite understand so the tutor does another. The student thinks he's starting to get the idea and tries the third problem but can't quite get it, so the tutor shows him where he went wrong and ends up doing that one. Soon, the tutor has done half the assignment before the student can successfully complete a problem on his own.  Does that constitute cheating as the student eventually learned how?

Some guys and I would do homework together and we'd routinely compare our answers. If we got different answers, we'd compare how we did the problem and debate the correctness of our respective methods. In the end, we'd usually agree someone had the correct method, and redo the problem that way. Does that constitute cheating as we were working together with the purpose of learning?

We don't know how the referenced Facebook group worked things. I'm sure there were probably a few students who just checked out the group to find free answers or solutions. But if the group was similar to the Learn groups I've had in some chemical engineering classes, then people just posted hints or tricks (use Eqn. X from the book; use a certain method, etc.). I even had a couple professors who posted hints on Learn for homework problems.

How much collaboration is too much? Being a working man in industry, even though I've only been employed for a couple months, I've yet to work on a project that doesn't require help from someone else. Classes have TAs who have office hours specifically to answer questions from students about the homework. What's the difference between using a TA for help or asking a friend?

One solution to the dilemma of collaboration is for professors to allow students to work together on a homework assignment. After all, the purpose of homework is to further a student's learning, and while the ideal situation would involve a student seeking help from either the TA or professor whenever problems arise, some students don't start working on projects until after normal working hours. Unless professors want to sacrifice their home lives so they can be a student's sole source for help, they need to accept that students will work together, and as long as the study group isn't directly copying the solutions from one member, I don't believe this constitutes cheating.

A Seattle Post-Intelligencer blogreports that Microsoft has taken steps to curb cheating in online, multiple-player versions of their X-Box games. [BACKGROUND FOR THE UNINITIATED AND/OR OLD: see, there are these things called video games in which players, mostly adolescent males, manipulate video characters through video tasks like shooting aliens, driving, playing a sport, riding a skateboard, etc. Video games were originally solo affairs played on one's own computer or specially-equipped television, but the Internet permits players to interact with each other, anonymously, in online versions.] The blog reports that web sites have been offering technically inclined players ways to modify the game surreptitiously so as to gain unearned advantages, e.g. being impervious to bullets or never falling off your skateboard.
This simultaneously raises and answers one question:  why would anybody cheat so as to remove the challenge from an activity that, without the challenge, is pointless?

A recent Chronicle of Higher Education article ("Anti-Cheating Crusader Vexes Some Professors", February 29, 2008 [subscription required]), reports on controversies over Turnitin in academia, specifically the objections of some observers that broad use of the plagiarism-detection service creates an atmosphere of distrust. As one interviewee put it, "Faculty might want to ask themselves how they would feel if their departments asked them to submit everything they wrote to a plagiarism-detection service."

Well, guess what: The Oklahoman reported on March 18 ("Computer Program Hunts Copycats,") that a professor at the University of Texas Southwestern has created a program to do just that - at least for medical researchers. According to UT Southwestern's press release, Dr. Harold "Skip" Garner has already used his program to identify over 7,000 cases in which published research was so highly similar to other research as to raise concerns about plagiarism, and a much larger number of cases in which papers with shared authors were so similar as to raise concerns about self-plagiarism.

As detection becomes easier, departments may well wonder who out there is checking up on the originality of their faculty's research.

...is supposedly a traditional saying among NASCAR racers. Most recently, the New York Times reported that NASCAR officials penalized driver Carl Edwards and his crew chief for illegally modifying their car on the way to a $425,675 victory in the Las Vegas Spring Cup. ( http://wheels.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/03/06/nascar-penalizes-driver-for-cheating/?hp, registration required) Many observers have commented on a perceived culture of cheating in stock car racing, which originated among moonshiners - a group, shall we say, not exactly steeped in the traditions of sportsmanship to begin with. Just a few years ago, another crew chief caught cheating told the AP: "If I had it to do again, I'd still try to get away with it because I know how I got caught."

Do self-confessed cheaters in highly-competitive sports still have values they respect absolutely? If so, what would those be? Presumably even the most aggressive and cheat-prone NASCAR driver still views himself as a good person, still draws the line at some kinds of cheating even without the threat of discovery, and still has some kind of argument to justify cheating in terms of the larger values of the sport. As Immanuel Kant realized long ago, there are two kinds of rules in this world: the kind we have to follow because they are imposed on us from outside, and the kind we choose to follow because we legislate them for ourselves.

College and university contracts with plagiarism-detection giant Turnitin.com are apparently safe for now. On March 11, a federal judge in Virginia threw out a copyright infringement lawsuit filed by high-school students who objected to the addition of their term papers to the Turnitin database. (Turnitin works by comparing uploaded student work against all previous submissions, and then adding that work to its database or future comparisons.) Turnitin won on both its theories - that the plaintiff students had promised not to sue when they agreed to the terms of Turnitin's "clickwrap" license, and that Turnitin's use of student work was "fair use" and therefore protected.
(See 2008 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 19715, in Lexis Academic - Legal, free for OU library users.)

Welcome to the University of Oklahoma's (and as far as we know the universe's) first blog on academic integrity. We hope this feature will be of interest to folks in the OU community who work on or live with these issues (which we hope means all of us).