Extent of Cheating Isn’t Easily Measured

When a company drummed up business at Pepperdine University a few years ago by writing, selling and distributing term papers, the school’s administrators cried foul.

They drummed some students out of school--for turning in papers they didn’t write--and protested that the company had carried the concept of American free enterprise too far.

“We can’t stop all cheating,” said John Wilson, dean of Seaver College, Pepperdine’s undergraduate liberal arts school. “But we’ve tried to set an anti-cheating tone on our campus. I tell our students, ‘Cheating is the academic equivalent of murder.’ Our students understand that if someone cheats, it cheapens--and casts into doubt--everybody’s degree.”

Cheating isn’t an epidemic on their campuses, officials at Pepperdine and several other Los Angeles-area universities and colleges contend. But they concede that the extent of cheating isn’t easily measured because most cases are dealt with quietly and never make headlines like those generated by the U.S. Naval Academy.

To wage war on plagiarism, exam cribbing and other forms of cheating, educators enforce written codes of conduct that are less rigid than those at the military academies and some old-line Southern schools.

“The informal hearsay is that cheating is a problem on most campuses, but not a major one,” said UCLA ombudsperson Howard Gadlin, who adds that his school constantly fine-tunes a code of conduct that he said is “very explicit on just about every kind of activity.”

At Caltech in Pasadena, an honor code states simply: “No member of the Caltech community shall take unfair advantage of any other member of the community.”

Inherent in that code is what Gary Lorden, the school’s vice president for student affairs, calls an understanding that “Caltech trusts the students and our students trust each other, knowing that cheating isn’t fair to the person down the hall, to your roommate, to yourself. We even give them keys to some of our laboratories and classrooms.”

And besides, Lorden said, Caltech’s rigorous science and engineering curriculum--with its laws, rules and formulas--feeds what he calls “a meritocracy based on knowledge.”

“When you take a subject like mathematics,” he said, “it’s impossible to fake it.”

Whenever widespread cheating occurs, some blame societal pressures, while others say moral imperatives have slackened.

“I’ve seen peaks and valleys--the pendulum swinging back and forth--since I returned here as a teacher in 1975,” said Eric Newhall, Occidental College’s dean of students and a onetime student there.

“It seems to reflect the times we live in,” he added. “When jobs get tight and the economy turns sluggish, the students’ anxiety picks up.”

At Loyola Marymount University, Joseph G. Jabbra, the school’s academic vice president, said: “I get upset when I hear people say, ‘Greed is the business of America.’ Why can’t they help us build an ethical fiber in our society?”

At Pepperdine, Wilson said many students focus excessively on “getting into med school or law school, on their (grade-point average), than on learning.”

At Cal State L.A., where many students are older (average age: 28), the emphasis is “more on getting an education than on grades,” said Tim Dong, the associate vice president for student affairs.

On the other hand, some students say a different kind of pressure--”big-time” peer pressure, one calls it--helps combat cheating.

Erika Arceneaux, 24, a graduate student in clinical psychology, said she heard only two cheating cases during the year she sat on Pepperdine’s undergraduate disciplinary board. “People are less apt to cheat here because they know their peers will turn them in,” she said.

Cecile Nguyen, 21, a Pepperdine senior majoring in international studies, added: “If I find out someone is cheating, I’m not going to tell the teacher or professor about it--I’ll tell the student. Around here, if somebody cheats, everybody else would be terribly upset with them.”

Ultimately, what makes Occidental’s honor system work, Newhall said, is much the same kind of trust that Caltech’s Lorden said endures at his school.

“We’re betting on the students, rather than against them,” Newhall said. “We assume they’ll behave in an honorable manner, and we’re surprised when they don’t. We feel they’re here to learn the subject matter, not try to beat the system.”