Statement On Cheating

The full time CS faculty met recently (April 2025) to discuss what we can do about blatant cheating that seems to have increased significantly in recent years (due to AI and to everything being online these days). This statement summarizes the overall consensus of the discussion. This statement was written by Jeff Kinne (so "I" is Jeff), with edits from the other CS faculty.

Faculty - Should be structuring assignments, exams, etc. so that it is not easy to copy, to use AI, or to otherwise cheat. Faculty should be looking out for academic misconduct and penalizing it when it occurs. It is my personal guess that there is likely a fair amount of cheating occurring in most if not all courses these days (especially with students asking AI to do their work). If a faculty member claims to not be aware of cheating in their courses, they may not be paying attention close enough or are not designing assignments, exams, etc. to prevent this, or simply don't care. That is not acceptable.

Faculty - Should also be giving grades that have real meaning. Faculty should not be giving all As in a course; that would normally mean the assignments were too easy or students are being allowed to cheat. The distribution of grades in a course is expected to be at most 1/2 As (or less, depending on the course) and will have at least a few Cs, Ds, and Fs. Of course we would love it if all or most of the students can do A level work themselves, but this is just almost never the case.

Faculty - Should be providing enough resources for students to succeed. This is in the form of good lectures, good assignments and grading, being responsive to student questions, etc.

Faculty - Avoid giving overly difficult or vague problems that go beyond the covered material or provided resources. When students feel unprepared or overwhelmed, they are more likely to use AI tools. We want to give really challenging problems sometimes, but only with just the right frequency.

Students - Should care about learning and getting something out of the courses they are taking. Should have respect for the faculty and fellow students. Every student that cheats is wasting the time of the faculty and other students and making for less learning for all students. If you cheat, you are committing an offense against the faculty and other students.

Students - Honest students should be frustrated with others who cheat. Your learning is being negatively impacted by the time that faculty have to spend trying to determine who is cheating and who is not. Honest students should be happy for efforts to prevent others from cheating.

Students - especially international students - might not fully understand what academic misconduct really means. We should be very clear with them: if they are caught cheating, it’s not just a zero on the assignment; they can fail the entire course and, worse, have a permanent note on their transcript that can’t be removed under any circumstances. Some students think they can just drop the course and retake it later (or find better shortcuts), but that’s not how it works when academic dishonesty is involved.

We will be changing the rules for taking online CS courses. From now on, only distance students will be able to enroll in the online sections of courses. Faculty can choose to be flexible with lecture attendance (i.e., allow students to attend online), but exams for face to face students will be taken in person. Face to face students who are not present in person for the exam will receive a 0.

I aim to get all of the CS faculty to agree to operate under the same standards for cheating - basically, zero tolerance. I aim to get all of the CS faculty to also hold distance students accountable (for example, by doing part of their exams as interviews with the distance student - to validate the work). I do not want students choosing courses strictly based on which ones they think they can get away with cheating. I aim to get faculty to have similar grading standards so that students choose courses based on the content they are interested in and not based on trying to get an easy grade. Students should show genuine attempts to learn course materials. Students who do not want to learn anything and always rely on help from AI and friends should NOT be graduating with a degree.

I aim to get students to have integrity and choose to do their own best work rather than trying to "get the right answer by any means". I aim to get students to care more about their own learning than their grade. (Many do already, but I want the percent to be much closer to 100%.)