You plagiarized a seminar paper, failed your final exam, walked out of the makeup exam and filed a lawsuit against your college, what would you get? "Expelled" would be a good first guess, but wrong. Apparently, if you're a criminal justice graduate student at Coppin State College, you get a master's degree.
Ludicrous as it sounds, that was the scene that played out at Coppin's graduation ceremony this past Sunday. The Chronicle of Higher Education has reported that the Baltimore college allowed at least seven students who failed the criminal justice department's graduation requirements to receive their master's degrees anyway. College administrators decided to let the students graduate after being slapped with a lawsuit.
The details of academic wrongdoing reported in the Chronicle are even more disturbing. To obtain a masters degree in criminal justice from Coppin, students must either write and defend a thesis or write a seminar paper and pass a comprehensive exam. Coppin criminal justice professor Richard Monk told the Chronicle that all ten students who sat for the exam this spring failed it. The students' seminar papers were also unsatisfactory, or even fraudulent: " 'Some were plagiarized from criminal-justice textbooks,' he said. 'One was less than five pages long and included a single source."
The failing students complained to administrators that the department had not prepared them for the exam by failing to schedule any study sessions. The grad students were given another shot at a makeup exam. Again, they all failed -- some even walked out during the test. That's when they went to court, arguing that "the other course work they completed in the program should be sufficient for graduation and that the students were not given proper notification of the comprehensive exam. They did not specify how the information they received about the exam was incomplete."
These recent events at Coppin State College represent a new low for academic standards in higher education, though it's not clear which aspect of the case is most worrisome: the fact that an entire class of graduate students would try to coast through school on shoddy and plagiarized work -- and then demonize the professors who uncovered their misdeeds, or that college administrators would turn a blind eye to academic extortion just to avoid the bad publicity a court case might bring (if that was the administration's purpose, then it has been depressingly successful -- I can find no other publications that have followed up the Chronicle's initial reporting).
Eroding standards and grade inflation point to a disturbing trend: too many college students, faculty and administrators have forgotten that the purpose of higher education is, well, education. Schools are placing ever-increasing emphasis on goals like promoting students' civic activism or community involvement and personal growth; these are valuable pursuits, and ought to be a part of an integrated academic experience. But, at the end of the day, education is about scholarship, and scholarship ought to remain the primary emphasis of any accredited degree program. Students are not entitled to graduate with degrees if they can't meet basic standards of scholarship (evidently, though, this fact was not obvious to some Coppin students -- criminal justice students, no less).
It's true that only a few schools nationwide have seen their standards erode like those at Coppin. The vast majority of colleges and universities -- big and small, public and private -- do an excellent job of educating students, and the American higher education system is still the best in the world. Certainly Dartmouth's academic standards are rigorous -- a fact that most students will be willing to testify to as exam week rolls around. But blunders like the one at Coppin this past Sunday, whenever and wherever they occur, reflect poorly on the university system as a whole. So students and professors everywhere have a vested interest in maintaining the quality of scholarship at their own institutions, but also throughout higher education as a whole. That means keeping a watchful eye on news from across the nation, and keeping the spotlight on ongoing campus discussions about scholarship and standards.
After all, it is students who suffer most from the reputation created by Santa Claus degree programs. At Coppin, the Chronicle told the story of Joycelyn Evans, a mother, full-time parole officer and the only criminal justice student to complete the graduation requirements this year. "They've called me a sucker," she said about her classmates. "Do you think companies are going to hire someone with a master's degree from this school? How do you calculate the value of this wasted effort?"
Evans was considering filing a lawsuit of her own against the school. If that's what it takes to stand up for academic integrity, then that's one suit I might have to support.
