I hope you have all had a restful break. It's now January 2024.
I want to start this entry with two stories - one about my first semester of teaching at UC Berkeley and one about my first semester of teaching at Brown.
My first semester as a graduate student, I taught a class called "Introduction to Cognitive Science". I was 21. I had just graduated from college the semester earlier and was really unsure what the difference was between myself and my students. I was responsible for about 50 students across two class meetings.
(as an aside, and I think this is kind of wild, in that class were Steve Mitroff, Meg Saylor, and Eddie Hubbard).
But there was another student. I'm going to call him Kevin.
I didn't really know Kevin. He came to class, but didn't participate. He didn't do that well on the midterm or the final paper. And he failed the final. I was in my office on the last day of the semester. I had returned the final earlier that day, and was about to submit my final grades to the registrar. When in walked Kevin.
(another aside - at the time, I shared an office with 4 other people, but no one was around - it was just me. This is a different story if one of my office mates had been present)
Kevin asks to talk about the final, and starts to argue about how I graded one of the questions. He hands over the blue book exam and I start to thumb through it to the question. And that's when he slides a $50 bill across the desk.
"I know I'm getting a D in this class. I want a B."
Kevin did not get a B.
******
I taught at Berkeley for three years. Although Kevin was the only student (to this day) who ever attempted to bribe me, I caught students cheating every semester. (my favorite, by the way, was the student who prerecorded answers to exam questions on a cd player. I caught him completely by accident. But I also caught a lot of students plagiarizing. Lots of copying and pasting. Lots of academic integrity violations). And Berkeley was strict. If you got caught, you just failed the class. It didn't matter what the assignment was. So, when I got to Brown, I was a little jaded. Because EVERY SEMESTER I caught students cheating.
In my first semester teaching at Brown, I taught an advanced seminar on cognitive development. It's changed a lot over the years, but I still teach it. It's my favorite course to teach. That first class was small - only six students. They were all very smart, and they all knew each other, so they were talkative. They wanted to contribute and discuss the material. It was a good class.
I've changed my assignments over the years, but for the final paper in that class, I asked them for a literature review and experimental proposal. 10-12 page paper. Nontrivial assignment. I graded the first four, and they were fine - a range from A to C+. Then I got to the fifth. I read the first paragraph. I had never read anything like it. I put it down. I needed to think. I took a break, graded the last paper (B+), then went back to the fifth paper. Read the first paragraph again. This was the best thing I'd ever seen a student write. It was better than I could write. I kept reading. The paper was so good - too good. I couldn't believe it.
I went down a rabbit hole next - scanning lines into google, trying to find where the student had copied the paper from (this was way before Turnitin or any other plagiarism checker). After maybe 5 hours of searching, I concluded that the student wrote the paper - that there was no cheating . It was just that good. I've only given a A+ on a paper twice in my life. This was the first time.
That student , by the way, is now a fancy professor at a fancy university. She's a true thought leader in the field of cognitive development, a force of nature as a researcher, a wonderful teacher, and an even better human being.
******
This isn't to say that there's no cheating a Brown. There's a lot, in fact. And I will admit that I have had many reasons to email Dean Wallace, who is now in charge of the academic misconduct committee. I have had a few incredibly memorable cases (which I'm not going to write about, except to say that every time - EVERY TIME - it sends me into a funk). But I tell all of this because I was reflecting on this with students in my class last semester. What came out of those conversations was that I asked one of the students who has been reading this blog if they would reflect on the academic code at Brown. This is what they wrote.
The student who wrote this reminds me a lot of the student from my first class - that is to say, capable of great things.
There’s a difference between what many students imagine the Academic Code says and what it actually means. Prior to reading it, I assumed the document was a list of things students shouldn’t do – thou shalt not plagiarize, or thou shalt not cheat on exams. The recent resignation of former Harvard President Claudine Gay over plagiarism accusations and related media coverage have made academic honesty a hot topic in classrooms and boardrooms across the country. I decided to read Brown’s Academic Code and reflect on its meaning in the current highly charged environment.
More than a list of don’ts, it turns out that Brown’s Academic Code reads rather like a How-To guide outlining the standards we should follow to be good scholars.
Yet, for a document so fundamental to the principles of academic study for the entire Brown University community, it appears few students have taken the time to read it. Neither long nor complex, the entire Academic Code is a seventeen page PDF document (not counting the table of contents) printed in large, reader-friendly font. It takes about ten minutes to get through it. So why, then, do so few students take the time to read it?
I myself didn’t get around to reading the Academic Code until senior year. During our advanced undergraduate seminar, Dr. Sobel surveyed his students as to whether they had read it. Like most in the class, I had not, so I Googled it after class. You, the student reading this blog post, probably haven’t read the Academic Code either (or maybe you’re in the minority of students who have, in which case, well done). I can’t speak for everyone, of course, but I didn’t bother to read the code until my professor brought it up for one simple and rather arrogant reason: I thought I knew it all already.
When students think of academic (dis)honesty, the first thing that might come to mind is the all-too-useful copy-paste function. It’s the forbidden fruit that we have all been trained not to eat. But plagiarism is much more than mere copy-paste. There is a far more insidious plagiarism that many students don’t even realize they’re committing.
Picture this: your professor assigns an essay prompt, and you have no idea where to start. So you plug some search terms into Google Scholar and eventually come across the Perfect Paper™. This paper makes the exact arguments you want to make, only better. Unfortunately, you can’t just repeatedly cite the same source over and over in your own paper; that would just look lazy. So instead, you read the paper carefully with your own Google document open in another tab. You rephrase the arguments, sprinkle in new sources, sample some of the same sources that the Perfect Paper™ used, and voilà! Your paper is complete. But it isn’t yours, even if you never copy-pasted.
I learned to cite my sources in fourth grade using MLA format. In elementary school, the concept of a citation was a free pass to copy any information you wished as long as the author’s last name was written after the text in parentheses. In middle and high school, we learned a few more rules on how and when and who to cite, but the fundamental principle stayed the same: if someone else said something, you could say it too, so long as you cited the source.
The rules, however, change in college, and not just because few use MLA outside of language arts and cultural studies. I love that Brown is a major research university with a strong undergraduate focus. One of Brown’s greatest strengths is that research is so accessible to undergrad students. But essential to generating research is recognizing where your ideas come from and how they’ve been influenced by others. This is where the Academic Code is quite helpful. The document states that placing your name on an assignment is essentially a contract. Anything a student puts their name on is “the result of the student’s own thoughts and study, stated in [their] own words, and produced without assistance except as quotation marks, references, and footnotes acknowledge the use of printed sources or other outside help.” Putting your name on someone else’s argument is academic dishonesty even if you cite the source somewhere in your text. This is surprising to a lot of students, and it’s an easy trap in which to fall, particularly given the presumably finite number of arguments available and the long line of scholars who have preceded us. Heck, Claudine Gay did it, and she got an award for her dissertation from Harvard.
Here’s something I wish I’d known freshman year: the Academic Code is about spirit. We come to Brown to be challenged; papers, quizzes, and exams are all tools that professors use to foster our intellectual development. When we integrate large block quotations into our essays or insert graphics from other sources to fill space, no matter how properly cited, the question arises: who does that work benefit? Not our professors, who end up looking at work that’s already been published, and not us, who could have used that space as an opportunity to generate more original scholarship.
Another tip I wish I’d known freshman year: it’s best not to write your papers while looking at other papers. It’s far too easy to slip into a writing voice that isn’t your own. This past semester, I wrote the first drafts of several of my papers with my computer on airplane mode so that I wouldn’t be tempted to switch tabs and glance at other sources while writing, and I was pleasantly surprised by the results!
Finally, the Academic Code isn’t there just to mark bright-line boundaries between acceptable and unacceptable conduct; it's there to define core values - essentially to provide a compass with which to navigate the distant frontiers of academia. The Code’s core values can serve as useful constants when exploring a sea of academic variables. In a universe where there is so little we do know and so few things we can control, we can, at least, control our own behavior. We can preserve our individual integrity while understanding that every little thing we do matters.
With this in mind I highly recommend that all freshmen read the Academic Code before starting their college careers at Brown.