I felt like I was on trial. At the end, the penalties imposed [on the students] were light.

I suspected a student of plagiarizing a portion of a final paper. I found the source (on the internet) the student had copied (word for word) and took it to my director. My director told me that because the student had no previous reported incidents (I wondered how we would know if they had occurred outside of the school, and felt it was irrelevant if this was a first offence) of plagiarism, that he would not be taking any action, and that I was free to either fail the student, ask for a resubmission of the work, etc. I was quite disgusted that my director essentially chose not to uphold the policy. In this case there was no question about whether plagiarism had occurred. No upholding/ enforcing policies at SFU in general is a huge problem, and I think that any attempt to solve the plagiarism issue should be addressed within this larger context. I often feel that administrators simply can't be bothered to do the jobs they have been appointed to. There are obviously exceptions to this, but this is a big problem, especially at the departmental level.

Many instances of cheating have occurred in a certain course, and the chair, students, and others have noted this and asked me to do something about it, yet no help was supplied by the department. Instead, it was clear that I was expected to do something about this on my own, and in a large class around 200 students this is a lot of extra work that I end up doing in my spare time. Many simple things could be done to help discourage cheating, or make it easier to catch, but there is apparently zero interest on the part of many administrators to provide any extra help to overworked teachers in large classes.

Nothing was done. I was thanked for reporting it. End of story.

The problem was not with the Chair, but with the [disciplinary] process.

The Undergraduate Director acted very professionally, but the maximum penalty available to us as an option was completely inadequate.

Two cases were reported to the UBSD [University Board on Student Discipline]; the UBSD required a great deal of paperwork, including written evidence of prior warnings to the students, then questioned the reliability of this evidence.

Always change assignments each and every semester

Come up with assignments unlikely to be available from paper mills

Devise specific assignments that virtually leave students no opportunity of getting someone else to complete assignments

Exams are not returned, students must submit electronic as well as paper copies of all assignments.

Have students sit apart from each other *when space permits*

I create different written assignments that can't be "bought". I work with revision and drafts in-class, I ask for proposals and advance evidence of paper development

Number exams and analyze patterns in answers of those in close proximity

Students can view marked midterms in tutorial but they are not permitted to keep the exams.

Try to teach students how to do their work without resorting to plagiarism, which is not at all easy, and for which SFU offers no resources for assistance

Use open book exams, design questions that require synthesizing information

A primitive and culturally unsophisticated understanding of 'cheating' (as a clearly identifiable moral failing of students (not faculty, e.g.), and dangers of a knee-jerk punitive response by a self-righteous faculty and admin which could harm a student who, after all, has been thus far taught to consume everything, including knowledge, by our own education system, who is given little education, and even less help in learning what it might mean to make intelligent and ethical use of information and ideas. Finally, the incredible double standard where our 'special' class of professors far better supported administratively than the rest of us donkeys, get very large research grants, which they have used university money to pay others to write, which others, including students [and/or] faculty, do all the actual research for while they show up at international meetings, equip themselves with expensive PDA's and other personal perks, and then, knowing next to nothing about the work, claim lead authorship of all papers produced. In fact it is SSHRC (federal government) policy that the 'PI" gets his/her name on all publications from a project--whether they have done [anything] on it or not! Isn’t THIS 'cheating"? So why punish students when this is what they see? Not to mention the shabby work which goes into helping students do their own assignments and papers seriously and intelligently... there’s [so much] cheating of this kind that is the lifeblood of the university, why get righteously indignant and punitive at students, the lowest ones on the plagiarism totem pole? And this new "business' of plagiarism detection (e.g. turnitin.com) just bolsters profs who want to avoid the work they should be doing, whether in the ways they design assignments, or in their efforts (not) to educate students about how to do work which has integrity. I’d argue, in fact, that using turinitin.com is just another form of cheating, its just one that serves the profs, not the students.

Concern that if my hard line on cheating becomes widely known by students, enrolment in my elective courses will drop, as would-be cheaters flock to courses that are less carefully monitored. Note: I don't let this stop me at the moment, but feel that I am taking a personal risk. I would prefer that there were a more standardized set of safeguards against cheating campus-wide.

Different versions of an exam: extra time required to make multiple versions.

Students sitting apart: large room availability.

Exam rooms are not adequate. We need larger exam rooms with lots of space between students e.g. gym and proctors.

I have no idea how to check the Internet other than entering a key words into Google. When the University adopted a plagiarism checking system and sent out notices, everything was by e-mail or on Internet. I did not note down the relevant sites and methods before the message was automatically deleted. I wish that paper copies were made available. I keep a file on plagiarism and would put the material there to be consulted, when necessary. I am 57 years old, but I doubt that my age alone explains my reaction. I asked two younger faculty if they knew how to access the plagiarism check, and they did not remember themselves.

Lack of support departmentally. For example, I reduce grades for poor citation (missing sources, improperly cited material, etc.). Students come and complain that their other profs have not "taken off marks for that" and that I am too concerned with format. The fact that my department has no consistent policy on this makes it difficult for me to maintain a standard I think is acceptable.

Most rooms at SFU are too small to allow for alternate seats to be used during exams. This is entirely UNSATIFACTORY.

Rooms often too small to keep students separated. Calculators/cell phones are becoming a problem if used in exams. They can be programmed with useful information and used to communicate between students.

Turnitin.com seems useful, but lack of training prevents me from using it. Another thing for me to learn about, which takes up more of my time, and as a sessional instructor who is already getting paid a pittance, and already overworked (e.g. a class of 100 with no tutorials and one course marker who knows nothing about the topic of the course) it's a challenge to motivate myself to voluntarily do more work in order to be more vigilant about academic integrity on the part of my students. Generally my impression is that teaching (including but not limited to monitoring and preventing students' academic dishonesty) is not well-supported or valued . . . despite some lip service, and at times I feel like the administration would rather I just not cause trouble (i.e. risk student appeals, cause paperwork, etc.).

Clearly articulating concepts such as academic integrity and explaining that doing research and writing developed valuable and transportable skills and that plagiarism was theft of other people's ideas and labour. Changing topics on papers and questions on examinations regularly. Checking suspected cases of plagiarism. Reporting all cases of plagiarism. Documenting cases of plagiarism.

Faculty need to adapt to the new demographics and increasing numbers of students trained in non western cultures. They need to take a less imperialistic attitude to education and see that certain intertextual practices are developmental strategies in emergent second language writers.

Faculty should inform students about what constitutes cheating. Faculty should always change assignments/exams every semester; I think some cheating goes on because some professors are too lazy to think of new and better assignments; some professors just do not put much work into their teaching.

One of the things this survey has not addressed is the intensification of work (larger class sizes, less support from TAs, the increasing demands on faculty to engage in significant research programs with no reduction in teaching). The impact of workload on academic dishonesty should not be ignored. Multiple guess tests are both easier to cheat on and easier to mark; developing "generic" assignments often entails less work on the part of a professor than coming up with an assignment that is impossible to cheat on. As long as the demands on professors remain high there will be a limited impact on cheating, because taking steps to curb cheating (such as setting up assignments that it would not be possible to purchase papers for) is often more time consuming than the alternative. The impact of workload on professor's work as it pertains to cheating should be addressed.

The faculty should insist that the admittance requirements for SFU include some type of English placement exam.

When I reflect on my own time as a university student, I cannot ever remember an instructor explaining plagiarism in class. We were expected to know what it was and to know that it was not allowed. There seems to be barely enough time in class to cover the course material. I would not know where to find the time to explain at length what constitutes academic dishonest and why it is unacceptable. I confess that I am not sufficiently aware of the penalties at SFU for academic dishonesty and of the structures that oversee problems of dishonesty and that mete out the penalties. Not long ago a colleague forwarded a protocol to follow in the case of academic dishonesty, which I took to be official policy at SFU. I found it very cumbersome and bureaucratic. I would like a method that gives individual faculty the freedom to act on their own within a set of guidelines.

A focus on grades and an abhorrence of learning. An increasing number of students do not have understanding and knowledge as a goal. They say so explicitly in conversation and on evaluations. For many, their single cognitive skill is memorization and every task must be turned into something that can be memorized. Better to memorize the answers to every previous exam than to learn the material.

Easy way to pass exams without hard work. Also, the poor examination room seating arrangements (tiered lecture room seating allows for cheating from students in front of you).

I have found that the drive to obtain an education has been shifted from the pure acquisition of knowledge and fulfillment of the student’s academic passion to a need to get high marks in order to get that job or get into grad school. Marks are important, but do not reflect the over knowledge and academic maturity of the student.

Penalties are lenient and it's often too difficult to prove cheating. Why bother? Sometimes difficult to know if students cheat willfully or are just ignorant of what academic integrity is - copying out what others have written is good scholastic practice in some countries and high schools. Difficult to monitor student behavior in large (100+) classes.

Pressure from parents to succeed; runaway grade inflation; deep lack of understanding about the nature of knowledge itself, and thus what constitutes cheating; lack of understanding about the nature of learning; short-sightedness about the importance of education (as distinguished from a degree) to their future careers.

Since all the students I teach are NNS [non-native speakers] of English, I am primarily concerned with the reasons affecting them. Although they engage in behaviors which the university's academic honesty policy considers cheating, I do not consider these behaviors cheating. Their weak paraphrasing skills and failure to understand western citation practices are the causes. See Howard, Pennycook et al for a fuller discussion of this.

They have been taught at school practices which are either ridiculously 'ethical", as if using an image from the internet is "stealing", or else absurdly dishonest, as if copying words out of books or the internet and simply citing your sources correctly, as if that could redeem the lack of thought and effort and engagement, A legalistic/consumer culture teaches them all this stuff, and we should be helping them to unlearn it, but we don’t. They see profs own dishonesty, a fine model. Many of us are dishonest in not giving student papers a seriously critical and thoughtful read and response. Finally we are not only dishonest but, frankly, racist in accepting anyone who can PAY, but giving them no means to succeed EXCEPT cheating.

What I see missing in this survey are cases where faculty members are encouraging or causing problems--for e.g. faculty members who do not require or ignore human subject research approval for course assignments requiring field research.