New ethics code to target cheaters

In further efforts to attempt to thwart cheating and improve academic honesty at UCCS, the educational policy and university standards committee has come up with a revised code of ethics. Intended to not only help faculty deal with cheating students but also provide students who  have unfairly been accused of cheating with a clear recourse of action.    

The chair of the Educational Policy and University Standards (EPUS) committee, English professor Tom Napierkowski, said the new code of ethics will make enforcing academic honesty less arbitrary. "The new code seems to me as an effort to declare the ethics code and to clarify the procedure to be followed when a student violates the code," he said.

Faculty currently have many options when confronted with cheating that do not require notifying the dean or provide any means of tracking. Instructors and professors can "downgrade, compel a rewrite, fail the test or assignment, or fail the student in the course," said Associate Dean of LAS, Rex Welshon. Further and more stringent punitive actions like a permanent note on the transcript, suspension, or expulsion requires a dean's permission, and these numbers are tracked.

Since 2002 there have been two instances of cheating that resulted in suspension and one that led to a student being expelled. According to Welshon, the most common form of cheating is plagiarism. "Most plagiarists are either ignorant or sloppy in citations," he said. There was also a situation where students were the perpetrators of organized cheating, and all students involved received an F in the course.

The hope is that the new code of ethics will protect students by providing a clear appeals procedure. EPUS committee members also anticipate faculty members being more comfortable following appropriate courses of action to reprimand and punish cheaters. Sandy Berry-Lowe, Associate Professor of Biology and EPUS committee member, is looking forward to the new handbook because some professors "don't know there's a real procedural policy." She said that cheating is very difficult to prove and plagiarism is definitely the most common form of cheating she has encountered.

"One of the major focuses we had in our deliberation was to clarify and make the appeals process more regular," said Napierkowski. The new code of ethics will be in place and followed next fall semester.