A recent scandal at the Duke University Fuqua School of Business leads me to discuss a distressing statistic: according to the article, 56 per cent of MBA students report cheating, while the overall graduate student population sees 47 per cent of students claiming to have cheated. This leads to an interesting question, though. What exactly constitutes cheating?

Most universities have the same general guidelines for what constitutes Academic Misconduct: plagiarism is always at the top, theft of exams from professors (i.e. grabbing a discarded printing error out of the recycling next to the department copy machine) is there with it, conspiring to share information on an examination is there as well. All of this is very clear-cut, and designed to keep a student or group of students from gaining an advantage over the others based on something other than their aptitude at a subject.

But there are ambiguous areas. After searching through the Stony Brook University website, I was unable to find anything that explicitly details what constitutes an academic violation for coursework. It gives details of how to lodge a grievance, appeal a decision, or what have you, but nothing that sets down the ground rules. Evidently, the rules on academic honesty are set forth by the professors themselves. While standards of common sense exist, none of my professors have ever had a discussion about what cheating is.

Of course, I don’t feel like I’ve ever manipulated the system to get ahead in grades, and frankly at this level getting an A or an A- in statistical mechanics means very little to me, but nevertheless, in a field that prizes academic honesty so much, I find it rather odd that the rules are so flexible. I understand that this is the nature of the field, and that collaboration is to be encouraged. But what kind of questions do these studies ask?

I honestly cannot see half of the graduate students at Stony Brook “cheating”. Collaboration on homework assignments is pretty much standard. And in a field like physics, where some publications have as many as five co-authors or as astronomically many as over 500 (as in the case of large collaborations such as PHENIX), this should probably be encouraged. Really, the only statement regarding academic honesty policy that I have received, from Peter Stephens for his Electrodynamics class, encourages working together, to a point.

Do these studies consider this cheating? I certainly hope not, unless the world is to come to view graduate students as cut-throat Machiavellians who only aim for personal achievement to the deteriment of the community as a whole. But what about undergraduate courses? Or high school?

I looked at my old high school’s website, and it was a piece of cake to find the vapid Mission Statement, and the entirely too serious dress code. But the website contained no information on academic misconduct. Well, surely there must be a county-wide policy of some sort. In a 52 page .pdf, dedicated primarily to disciplining the delinquints who bring cellular phones to school, there is half a page, listing the following as the “Student Code of Ethics:

1. I will be honest in my statements and actions.
2. I will respect myself, the school staff, and fellow students.
3. I will respect the beliefs of others.
4. I will display good conduct and sportsmanship at school, on the bus, and at all school activities.
5. I will respect the property of others.
6. I will work to the best of my ability.
7. I will use criticism in a helpful manner.
8. I will promote school cleanliness and the upkeep of school property.
9. I will make substitute teachers and visitors feel welcome.
10. I will support school activities.

“Honest in my statements and actions”. Perhaps the individual department websites give more insight. None to be found. It is practically impossible to find what constitutes “academic dishonesty” beyond what would be considered the obvious big offenses of plagiarism, falsifying information, and collaborating on exams.

There is a huge grey area where putting your name on your work, that you did with four other people, could be classified as cheating, but it may just be helpful collaboration. Our entire world is driven by collaborative efforts amongst many, many people. Who gets acknowledged? If I do a homework assignment with three other graduate students, should I list them all as co-authors to share credit for the work? When we get to the “real world” and begin working on projects, whose name goes on the final presentation? These questions are very important, particularly to the bit players. When does an undergraduate researcher do enough work to warrant being listed as an author on a research paper?

This has long-term ramifications — an undergraduate with a publication to his name is a much stronger candidate for graduate admissions than a comparable student without. One principle investigator who considers doing a literature review and proofreading a paper for grammatical mistakes enough to list an undergraduate as a co-author gives that student an intrinsic advantage over another student. There is some talk about leaving people off who deserve to be on, but what about the other way around?

All this conversation comes from a simple observation: in a society driven by collaboration, our education systems never set down the important line between healthy collaboration and academic dishonesty. The rules flow from instructor to instructor for sixteen or more years of education, with no real guidelines on the ethics of collaboration. Maybe universities should start considering including these things in their ethics courses, or at least writing something down in their code of conduct. Then we’ll see what happens to that 47%.