*Editor's note: This is the second installment in a three-part series examining cheating at Dartmouth.**##
Tech-savvy Dartmouth students are finding new methods to cheat through digital means, from looking up answers during restroom breaks to searching on the Internet for answers to problem sets and take-home tests.
"Technology really makes it easier for people who want to cheat to do so," said Teresa Fishman, director of the Center for Academic Integrity, a national forum with 360 member institutions. "Before you were kind of limited to copying from someone you know."
In the 2008-09 academic year, two students were brought before the Committee of Standards for "consulting unauthorized sources for graded work," according to that year's COS Annual Report
Interviews with students suggest that the practice is more prevalent on campus.
A female member of the Class of 2013, for example, found a copy of her linguistics problem set online and transcribed the answers, she said.
"I guess it is cheating," she said. "I didn't search it with the intention of cheating, but I took advantage of what I found."
Another female member of the Class of 2013 admitted to searching for answers to her economics and calculus problem sets.
"I know I shouldn't be doing it," she said.
Computer science department chair Thomas Cormen, a former member of the COS who co-wrote "Sources and Citations at Dartmouth College," said he believes that using online resources to solve assignments and not attributing them is "absolutely academic dishonesty and should go before the COS."
"If you attribute [online resources,] it is not academic dishonesty," Cormen said. "But, you are also not learning anything. The value of doing these problems is in the actual value of developing a solution and explaining it."
Cormen, the author of the computer science textbook "Introduction to Algorithms," says he is playing a perpetual "cat-and-mouse game" on the Internet, looking for individuals who are sharing or selling solution manuals for his book.
Other faculty members, on the other hand, say that students benefit from using the Internet as a resource to solve homework assignments.
Mathematics professor Scott Pauls has a subscription to Hot Math a website that has step-by-step solutions to problems in over 300 math textbooks that he shares with his students.
"I trust that students want to do well in the class," Pauls said. "Different students learn differently. Some students learn by mimicking examples."
He said he views homework as a practice tool and uses exam results to determine students' grades.
A male physics major in the Class of 2012 said that copying problems is "one of the best ways of learning physics" and is "just a way of being resourceful."
The student said he would not use the Internet as a resource for take-home tests, however, and views doing so as a violation of the Academic Honor Principle.
"For a take home test, I could have easily typed in the answers, but I just feel like you won't learn as much," he said.
Janet Kim '13 said the Internet should not be used as an answer key to take-home exams.
"Homework is still part of the learning process," she said. "For take-home tests, there's a trust."
Most students and faculty agree that finding answers on the Internet for take-home exams is a violation of the Academic Honor Principle. Opinions differ as to whether cheating includes using online resource to find solutions to graded homework assignments.
Whether or not using the Internet to solve problem sets is academic dishonesty depends on the parameters the professor has set up and what skills he or she is trying to reinforce, according to Fishman.
"Sometimes, the skill that is called for is that you can locate the answer," Fishman said. "Other times, the skill that is called for is can you derive the answer yourself."
Professors are responsible for creating clear guidelines, Director of Judicial Affairs April Thompson said, adding that the problem of students using online resources for graded assignments has only developed in the last five years.
"It is impossible for the College to make a policy that applies to everyone," Thompson said. "It's all up to the faculty and what the faculty set out as expectations for the class in the beginning."
Instructors are responsible for clarifying when they hold exams to a different standard from homework, according to mathematics professor Dana Williams.
"A student can be excused for assuming that whatever was okay on the homework is okay on the exams unless the instructor made it crystal clear that the rules are different," Williams said.
Some students believe that it is important for faculty members to write their own homework and take-home exam questions, not simply use problems from textbooks.
"For a homework assignment, professors should be very careful to create their own questions so that they are not simply taking a textbook's information and assuming that students wont be able to find it," a member of the Class of 2012 said.
As a computer science professor, Cormen usually writes his own assignments, he said. When teaching a Writing 5 class, he assigned an essay on what was right and wrong about Bobby Breigen's 1957 article on batting orders.
"I didn't have to worry about my students going out and finding that on the Internet," Cormen said.
While the Internet has made it easier for students to commit academic dishonesty, it has also made it easier for professors to catch cheaters.
"It also gives teachers some tools that they didn't have before," Fishman said. "The police get a better radar gun, but people get better radar detectors."
While most professors interviewed do not use turnitin.com and other plagiarism detection software, they do search the Internet once they become suspicious of a student.
"A student writes a paper, a professor reads it and says, This is not the type of writing this student typically produces.' So, the professor types in those very words, and bingo up pops the documents," Cormen said. "Google may be the students' friends, but it's also the professor's friend."
