Collaboration Post-Gov 1310

When teaching United States in the World 26: “Sex and the Citizen: Race, Gender, and Belonging in the United States” this past spring, women, gender, and sexuality lecturer Caroline Light left little room for interpretation on what constituted appropriate and inappropriate collaboration.

Light laid out her guidelines during lecture, included a statement “clearly” outlining her expectations on every assignment, and prominently featured her collaboration policies on her course iSite.

She said she thinks there is a ”rising awareness, not just among students, but among faculty, of the importance of clear communication around our expectations for our students.”

“Sometimes I just assume everybody knows what plagiarism is, and I can’t do that,” she added.

Light is one of many faculty members who have attempted to make their collaboration policies explicit in the wake of Harvard’s August announcement of a cheating scandal unprecedented in scope. Throughout the fall semester, the Administrative Board investigated roughly 125 undergraduates accused of inappropriately collaborating or plagiarizing on the spring 2012 final take-home exam in Government 1310: “Introduction to Congress.”

In the days following the announcement of the investigation, faculty questioned what impact heightened scrutiny of student work prompted by the scandal would have on the classroom. There was value, they said, in certain types of collaboration.

“The reason that [study guides] existed in the first place was that they were actually helpful to students,” government professor Stephen D. Ansolabehere told The Crimson in August. “What’s going to happen in chemistry when you can’t take in some study guides that help you remember the periodic table?”

A year after students in Government 1310 turned in their final exams, students and professors say that collaboration in the classroom remains. But with the push for faculty to clearly define their policies governing academic integrity and the proposal of Harvard’s first honor code, many say it has taken on a highly regulated form.

‘OPEN NOTE, OPEN BOOK, OPEN INTERNET, ETC.’

When the cheating scandal was announced, administrators were quick to place it within the context of a broader conversation about academic integrity at Harvard.

“[T]his alarming set of allegations requires, in our view, a new campus-wide discussion among faculty, students, and administrators about academic honesty,” Dean of Undergraduate Education Jay M. Harris wrote in an email to undergraduates on August 30. “We must all work together to build a community that fully embraces the ethos of integrity that is the foundation of all learning and discovery.”

Students had said discrepancies between the policies governing assignments in Government 1310 and the actions of the course’s teaching staff had contributed to widespread cheating. The collaboration policy at the top of the course’s final exam described it as “completely open book, open note, open internet, etc.” and also prohibited students from “discuss[ing] the exam with others—this includes resident tutors, writing centers, etc.”

One student who was implicated in the cheating case told The Crimson in an email that he thought the policy was clear on paper but not in practice. Teaching fellows held office hours and worked with students before the take-home exam was due, helping with answers while students collaborated in front of them despite the written policy. The student was granted anonymity by The Crimson because he did not want to be associated with accusations of cheating.

When undergraduates returned to campus in the fall, administrators made a push to make sure collaboration policies were clear. Harris asked in his August communication that all students review the guidelines in the Student Handbook outlining Harvard’s stance on academic dishonesty. Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences Michael D. Smith urged faculty in an email at the start of the semester to include a description of their courses’ collaboration policies in their syllabi—something that faculty have been required to do since 2010—in addition to discussing those policies in class. In the email, Smith asked that faculty “share best practices on how we can each foster a culture of honesty and integrity in our classes and learning assessments.”

“Your efforts are essential to our success,” he wrote.

REGULATING COLLABORATION

In the wake of the scandal, there has been a call for faculty as well as students to foster a regulated type of collaboration and lay out the rules governing a class’s take on academic integrity in the spirit of what Smith had described.

Harris told The Crimson in an email that the request that faculty communicate their collaboration policies on their syllabi was approved “to reduce ambiguity.”

“The more information provided to students about expectations, the less likely they will accidentally run afoul of the policy in any class,” Harris wrote.

According to Harris, “a significantly increased portion” of faculty have included collaboration policy statements on their syllabi or websites this past year. Some professors further explicated their rules governing collaboration while giving their first lectures during shopping week while others emphasized the guidelines whenever passing out major assignments throughout the year.

Philosophy professor Edward J. Hall devoted almost an entire page of the syllabus for his class Philosophy 151z: “Philosophy of Quantum Mechanics” to explaining his collaboration policy this spring. His reason for doing so, reads his syllabus, was “the Notorious Cheating Scandal of 2012.”

Hall said he thinks a well-defined collaboration policy could help students better understand what is expected in terms of collaboration.

Students say that in the aftermath of the cheating scandal, they have noticed faculty’s policies governing collaboration becoming more specific and, in general, more clear.

Mariel N. Pettee ’14, a math and physics concentrator, said she has seen a change in her professors’ approach to collaboration policies, citing the final take-home exam for Mathematics 136: “Differential Geometry” as an example of rules being explicitly defined. Pettee said she appreciated that the professor in that class told her that for the test, “‘You could use any of your notes, your textbooks, you can also use resources on the internet if you need to—you just can’t collaborate with each other.’”

Still, the cheating scandal and the increasingly explicit nature of academic integrity statements on syllabi have left a small portion of students anxious about breaking policy, regardless of any intention to cheat.

The student implicated in the cheating scandal wrote that he is now afraid to collaborate at all for fear of being accused of cheating and facing the Ad Board again.

Robert T. Bowden ’13, who this year was the head teaching fellow for Computer Science 50: “Introduction to Computer Science” and has been a member of the class’s teaching staff in the past, said this fall he noticed some students worrying more about following collaboration policies in the aftermath of the cheating scandal.

Bowden said he also observed this trend when he was a TF for Computer Science 161: “Operating Systems” this spring. The class administered a take-home exam that prohibited students from using the Internet to answer questions, but allowed them to do things like check their email so long as their discussions were not about the test. Bowden recalled one student who was so concerned with following the rules that he emailed asking if it was in accordance with the policy to have sent his mother a Facebook message while taking the exam.

Administrators say the push to clarify policies governing academic integrity was not meant to place every type of collaboration under scrutiny.

Harris told The Crimson in an email that the administration did not want to “curtail collaboration where it is appropriate.”

“We all agree that collaboration is an increasingly important element of pedagogy in many disciplines. We want to enable and support collaboration among students when and where appropriate, as determined by the course instructors,” he wrote.

TOWARD AN HONOR CODE?

Some say the next step in this move toward policing collaboration is the implementation of Harvard’s first-ever honor code.

At the monthly meeting of the FAS in April, Harris presented such a proposal, drafted by the administrators, faculty, and students on the Committee on Academic Integrity. If approved and implemented, the honor code would establish a written commitment to academic integrity beyond individual faculty collaboration policies.

As written, the proposal would create a Student/Faculty Judiciary Board populated by both students and faculty exclusively to hear cases of academic dishonesty and would require students to sign a “declaration of integrity” on major assignments and exams.

Terah E. Lyons ’14, a member of the Committee on Academic Integrity, said collaboration is just one aspect of the broader conversation about academic integrity at Harvard.

“There’s been a large focus on [collaboration] because that was seemingly sort of the crux of the problem that occurred with the scandal in the fall,” Lyons said. “I think that the idea of being an honorable student or upholding honor or being someone who integrates integrity into their academic practices is a notion that includes collaboration amongst many other concepts.”

The Committee will seek more student feedback on the honor code in the fall, according to Lyons.

Light described the introduction of an honor code as a continuation of the trend towards explicitly defining collaboration policies that she and many members of the faculty followed this past year.

“It’s a public articulation of a set of standards that we hold in common,” Light said. “For me personally, since Harvard doesn’t have its own honor code, I guess that’s sort of what I’ve tried to do this year, is to keep calling students’ attention to the kinds of expectations that...people are going to conduct themselves as exemplary citizens in the classroom, that they’re going to make their best effort to adhere to our community standards for integrity.”

—Staff Writer Madeline R. Conway can be reached at mconway@college.harvard.edu. Follow her on Twitter @MadelineRConway.

—Staff writer Zohra D. Yaqhubi can be reached at zyaqhubi@college.harvard.edu. Follow her on Twitter at @zohradyaqhubi.