It has been two years since 78 students were implicated for violating the honor code in Dartmouth's largest cheating scandal. While the sensitivities surrounding the highly publicized incident in the Computer Science 4 class have faded with time, the effects of the scandal continue to be felt.
In Feb. 2000, visiting professor Rex Dwyer took the unparalleled step of accusing almost half of his CS4 class of copying answers to a homework assignment from the course web site. He said as many as 40 students accessed the answers to the small assignment while they were posted on-line, while others sought and received help from teaching assistants and graders.
Since then, the department has yet to implement any major policy changes, but computer science classes have never been quite the same.
The CS4 scandal is now discussed at the beginning of almost every course when professors bring up the honor code. Most computer science classes have very detailed honor codes so as to leave nothing to the imagination, and students are told to document everything and everybody they consult, even if that means they won't receive as strong of a grade.
"Everybody's more aware of cheating," said Scot Drysdale, who was the department chair at the time of the cheating.
Professors also go to greater efforts to prevent situations in which cheating might occur. Many professors are no longer "publishing solutions on the web before they're turned in," Drysdale said, although answers are often still available on the Internet.
The computer science department has also worked to eliminate other possible causes of the cheating scare.
One charge Dwyer levied was that, as a visiting professor, his fellow instructors did not give him enough support in helping him acclimate to Dartmouth life.
Now, visiting professors are assigned a faculty mentor who helps guide the visiting instructor throughout the courses he teaches. The mentors are available "to consult with on homeworks and grading," Drysdale said.
Visiting professor Thomas O'Connell, who taught CS4 last term, said the mentoring system has served him well since he arrived at the College in June 2000.
O'Connell's said the mentor system has been highly successful. His mentor, professor Javed Aslam, has "given me a lot of good input on teaching and how things work here," he said. Aslam observed one of his lectures, O'Connell said, and "gave me comments that were awesome and really helped me a lot."
While the mentoring program did exist at the time of the incident, "it may not have been as universal," said Drysdale, who stepped down as department chair soon after the scandal receded.
Cheating is not unheard of in computer science classes, Drysdale said. In "larger courses, there might be one or two instances that might come up" per term, he said, adding that many courses have no instances of academic dishonesty.
Determining if cheating occurs is difficult, especially in a computer science course where there are only a few methods of achieving a program design, O'Connell said.
"Graders keep an eye out for that kind of thing," O'Connell said, adding that "for some homeworks it's harder than others" to determine if cheating occurred.
Despite the questions the scandal raised about the College's method of investigating cheating incidents, the department's process for dealing with accusations has remained the same, Drysdale said.
"The faculty rules say that anything [where] there is a strong suspicion of cheating should go" before the Committee on Standards, which hears cases of academic dishonesty, Drysdale explained. "The only thing determined in the department is if it should go to the COS."
A month after cheating allegations were brought against the 78 students and after the College conducted an extensive investigation, 63 students were brought before the COS for hearings about the suspected cheating. Fifteen others, meanwhile, were under investigation.
Yet after hearing only 23 cases, the COS found that though cheating did occur, there was insufficient evidence to determine who was responsible, and exonerated all the students from the CS4 charges.
"The nature and quality of the evidence, combined with the circumstances under which the course was conducted, made it impossible to distinguish between those responsible and those not responsible for violations of the Academic Honor Principle," Dean of the College and non-voting COS chairman James Larimore wrote in a letter to the Dartmouth community.
Dwyer said he did err in making the homework answers available on-line prematurely, but he placed much of the blame on the students who cheated.
"There were a number of students who made the mistake of collaborating with each other," he said in a phone interview..
Dwyer said he has tried to move on. After leaving Dartmouth, he returned to NC State, and since last summer, he has run a consulting firm.
"I've mostly put that unpleasant incident in my past," he said.
