In the third major academic dishonesty incident in as many years, 187 students at the Georgia Institute of Technology were accused Wednesday of collaborating on a class project.
Duke administrators say each large scandal--like those at the University of Virginia last year and Dartmouth College the year before--is a reminder that Duke cannot assume the same large-scale cheating is not going on.
"When these big mass scandals happen at other schools, we get more energized to work on our community," said Judith Ruderman, vice provost for academic and administrative services, who is chairing Duke's Academic Integrity Council. "My guess is that you have less of that at smaller schools. But they're wake-up calls, aren't they?"
Kacie Wallace, associate dean for judicial affairs, said what has happened at all those schools could happen at Duke.
"I think that kind of collaboration goes on across the country," she said. "I'm not sure to the same extent, and some of it may be legitimate misunderstanding, and some of it may be blatant and unauthorized."
Last fall, Robert Thompson, dean of Trinity College, decided to use turnitin.com, a website that helps detect academic dishonesty.
Wallace said she has used the website eight to 10 times since then and that she was aware of other academic deans using the site. "It is very helpful when a paper is plagiarized from multiple sources," she said. "If a paper is plagiarized from one source, it's easier to go through google.com or other search engines."
In addition to the Georgia Tech scandal, 122 students were implicated in a search of term papers at the University of Virginia last spring. Professor Louis Bloomfield designed a program to scan his database of over 1,500 papers.
Although Duke has not designed its own software, some professors have used turnitin.com and other similar services.
Owen Astrachan, co-director of undergraduate studies in computer science, said he thinks Duke students are about as likely to cheat as students at any other university. He added that the department has used a plagiarism-detection program from the University of California at Berkeley called Measure Of Software Similarity, or MOSS.
"If the question is, ODo Duke students collaborate?' Of course I think that," Astrachan said. "I don't think everybody is, but I think there are areas where it's kind of gray. We have an explicit policy, but some students do more than they're supposed to."
Despite the council's progress, administrators struggle to find an effective way to combat cheating. "We talk a lot in the Academic Integrity Council and other groups [about] what approach to take: education, prevention, whether to police and how does the honor code play into that," Wallace said. "Will an environment of trust encourage that to happen?"
Duke formed the council last semester, following last spring's recommendation from the Academic Integrity Assessment Committee. Ruderman said the council has broken into subcommittees to address assessment, build structures and establish communication with students and faculty. The council will issue a report later this spring.
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