Cheating is considered a serious offense here at the University of Rhode Island. As a school that stresses academic honesty and integrity, cheating is not taken lightly.
When a student it caught or suspected of cheating in the classroom, the professor has three options, according to Assistant Director of Community Standards Joe Berardi. The first option is to fail the student for the assignment. The second option, pending the Dean’s approval, can result in the student failing the course. For the first option, the professor will have a conversation with the student about the misconduct and a formal notice will be written and be placed in the student’s conduct file. If it is the student’s first infraction, this will likely be the extent of the punishment.
Berardi commented that “failing the assignment [would be] punishment enough.”
The third option, usually reserved for the most egregious of offenses or repeat offenders, is the professor conferring with the Dean to request student conduct action. Here, there is an investigation to determine the degree of guilt of the student. According to the URI Student Handbook, the student needs only to be found to “more likely than not” have committed the violation.
This is a distinct difference from the policy of the modern day judicial system where guilt must be proven “beyond a reasonable doubt.” After the investigation is completed and if the student is believed to have cheated, the student can opt to either accept the sanction against them or appeal the Dean’s decision. If it is failure on the assignment by the professor, the student can appeal to the professor’s Dean. If it is failure of the course, the student can appeal the Dean’s decision to the Provost and Vice President for Academic Affairs.
For a more detailed description of this process, see pages 28-50 in the URI Student Handbook, which can be found on the university’s website.
According to Berardi, the most common types of cheating seen on campus include cheating on exams, failure to pass the copyleaks.com plagiarism checker for schools, and collaboration on assignments when group work is not permitted. While these may seem obvious, not every student fully understands what constitutes cheating.
According to the URI Student Handbook, each of the following is considered to be cheating: “Claiming disproportionate credit for work not done independently, unauthorized possession or access to exams, fabricating or falsifying facts, data, or references, facilitating or aiding another’s academic dishonesty and submitting the same paper for more than one course without prior approval from the instructors.”
For other examples of what the university considers cheating, refer to pages 12 and 13 in the Student Handbook.
Upon speaking to various professors, it does not appear that cheating is an overly common occurrence here at URI; however, it does happen. Dr. Jill Doerner of the Sociology department and graduate student Zachary Kunicki of the Psychology department both said they had caught students cheating in the past. Dr. Doerner stated she had seen students “plagiarize, cheat on exams, turn in the same homework as students in their class and work on online assignments together (like exams or quizzes) when they were not allowed to work together.”
There does not appear to be any demographical patterns of cheating on campus in regards to majors, colleges, or grade level. “I have had all levels of students cheat as well as all types of students (students who receive good grades and those that don’t),” Dr. Doerner said.
While cheating on campus is taken very seriously, professors are humans too and they truly want to see their students succeed. Kunicki highlighted the importance of understanding the context of the situation and the reasoning behind the student’s actions. “There is usually something else going on,” Kunicki said. “I want to understand the full story.”