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University Daily Kansas Thursday, May 19. 1960
Who's the Winner?
Soon students on this campus and throughout the nation will prepare to undergo the traditional and all-important academic trial by fire — the final examination.
But while most students will willingly submit to the ethics of the American final examination system, many will sell themselves out for the first, tenth or hundredth time. The unprincipled cheat, the student who has coasted through a useless college career by picking the minds of his fellows, will begin to stir again in the fourth week of May.
The gimmicks are familiar. The crib notes written on the cuff or even on the inside of the arm, the stolen examination copy, the code system for multiple choice and the tried-and-true long and intent gaze at another's paper are all favorite methods.
He is part of a rapidly growing society; the thieves of intellect. Estimates of the number of students who cheat more or less regularly have ranged up to 80 per cent in some schools, and those who have made the pioneer studies in this field report that the disease may be expected to spread on every campus in the nation.
But the machinery is not the important thing. The fact that such a practice exists and is spreading should give pause to all who are concerned with the nation's moral health.
Perhaps even more important is the fact that many of the cheats do not honestly see that they are committing a crime against themselves and their society, a society that may soon produce teachers who cannot teach, engineers who cannot build, doctors who cannot treat the sick.
How can the cheat be so monstrously ignorant as to ignore the damage he is doing to himself?
A more pertinent question might be: in our present society, is the college cheat actually harming himself at all?
Moralists tell us that the student who rides through college on the gray matter of his more principled contemporaries is only hurting himself.
But in a society where the cash dollar is a moral value, and where the split-level ranch house in the suburbs and a $10,000 income are the highest possible measures of success in life, can it be true that those who are "just making sure" that they get that vital diploma are harming themselves?
We maintain that it is true; for even if the student who cheats can, in present society, achieve his limited goals, he has still deprived himself of the priceless opportunity of stretching his mind beyond that split-level house and $10,000 job.
- Bill Blundell
Sound and Fury
Institutional Commitment
For a few years I've had a theory about the administrative mind. For want a better descriptive term, I call it I-C, institutional commitment.
No matter how small the post, how menial the tasks the administrator performs, he believes himself a key part of the institutional apparatus, to which he devotes himself unstintingly. With pen in hand he mounts his Rosiane and moves to battle what he supposes are threats to the domain he is chosen to protect.
FIVE BEEN hard put to provide many clear-cut examples of I-C since it flourishes at a level most people are not privy to. In fact, at times I have thought of forgetting the theory because I could win no converts, for what good is a theory that sits gathering dust?
But now, friends, I have my man. Or men. I have a choice example of I-C that all of the readers of this newspaper undoubtedly have seen.On Monday I noted the statements of some members of the English administrative apparatus who refused to tell your newspaper how many students took the English Proficiency test.
GENTLEMEN of the English Department, I salute you for your gaitant stand in defending such information. Of course the material is piffl, of no matter at all. But you undoubtedly saw that the institution—the English Department or, horrors, the University itself—might be criticized if it were to get
out that two-fifths of the students cannot rise above a sixth grade competence in handling their own language.
Usually, the men who stand so steadfast in support of the institution they serve are unrecognized. I want to recognize you, gentlemen. Do I hear a second? —A.B.C.
Let's Go Dutch
An open letter to the man of KU:
Did you ever stop to wonder why, when you go on a date — you pay?
It just occurred to me that we are being taken for suckers. Can this be the way we want it, or is it more likely we are expected to take on the entire financial setback?
to some thought, discussion and eventually revolution!
I'm quite sure that my question will not lead to a crusade for piggy bank breaking on the part of KU females, but I do hope it leads
Jim McMullan Long Beach, N. Y., senior
Short Ones
Students at the University of Rhode Island tried to decide whether to abolish student government in an all-university debate. No final action was taken, but many reportedly felt their government was merely a plaything of the faculty.
LITTLE MAN ON CAMPUS By Dick Bibler
"REPUNZEL WON'T TELL HOW SHE DOES IT, BUT SHE MANAGES TO SNEAK SOME BOY UP INTO HER ROOM ALMOST EVERY NITE."
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University of Kansas student newspaper Founded 1889, became biweekly 1904, triweekly 1908, daily Jan. 16, 1912.
editor
EDITORIAL DEPARTMENT
Donglas Yoom and
S. Lloyd / Editorial Edition
NEWS DEPARTMENT
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Ray Miller, Carol Heller, George DeBord and Carolyn Frailey, Assistant Managing Editors; Jane Boyd, City Editor; Ralphe (Gabby) Wilson and Warren Haskin, Sports Editors; Carrie Edwards and Priscilla Burton, Society Editors.
From the Magazine Rack -
Cheating
In a "drastic change" in policy, the university has ruled "that any student found guilty of cheating or plagiarism will be dismissed from the university."
Cheaters and plagiarists no longer get a second chance at the University of California at Los Angeles.
"I don't know of any other university that has a stronger policy on this," says UCLA's associate dean of students, Byron H. Atkinson.
This has not always been so. Past policy at UCLA recognized four different degrees of academic dishonesty.
For these four degrees of dishonesty there was, as Dr. Atkinson explains, "an hierarchy of penalties," ranging from a maximum of dismissal to a minimum of failure and official censure.
UCLA took its strong stand in the wake of some pretty strong independent action on the part of one of its faculty—Robert A. Bone. Dr. Bone, an assistant professor of English, after close study of a group of term papers submitted in one of his classes, concluded that 10 of them were outright plagiarisms.
He flunked all 10 students involved, among them some who needed a passing grade to graduate. Then, as UCLA policy requires, he notified the Faculty-Administration Committee on Student Conduct of his action.
The news caused a stir on campus. The committee not only unanimously supported Dr. Bone, but issued a reprimand of its own to each of the 10 students...
So the committee, headed by Ralph Cohen, associate professor of English, set out to make it clear. Dr. Cohen and two others of the eight-member, faculty-administration committee met to draft the new policy statement.
It is a strong, unequivocal, succinct document.
"A student," it reads in part, "is not an empty receptacle into which the faculty pouns knowledge: the student's role in education is an active one, and he alone bears the responsibility for the work he does. Whoever refuses this responsibility is unworthy of a university education. A student who steals work, or cheats in any way, is refusing the responsibility that is his, and so forfeits the right to remain a member of the academic community...
"Plagiarism in any form, whether from published works or unpublished papers of either students, is an action that will lead to dismissal from the university, since it represents a disregard of accepted standards of education, scholarship, and morality."
Nor does the statement stop at just the act itself: "It is the obligation of the student not to cheat, not to create the appearance of cheating, and not to contribute to cheating by others." All these violations will be punished by the same hard penalty.
Dr. Cohen and his associates put the onus of enforcement on the academic community as a whole. "If plagiarism and cheating are to be abolished," they wrote, "every member of the academic community must act to prevent them. Each examination, each assignment—no matter how large or small—must be an occasion for demonstrating academic and personal responsibility."
(Quoted from a news story in the Christian Science Monitor, March 31, 1960.)
Numbers Game
(ACP)—From the UCLA DAILY BRUIN comes the report of a "prejudice-proof" grading system for UCLA's Law School.
The new system resulted from a fight between a student and a professor who allegedly failed him because of "political disagreements," and destroyed his examination paper to prevent recourse.
In the new grading system, numbers are assigned to final exam papers and professors have no access to students' names. Grading is by number only. Not until grades are entered and distributed can a professor find out a student's number, but he can add or subtract three points from a student's grade for class participation and attendance before seeing the number.
"This gives the student complete freedom to say what he wants in class, and it discourages the kind of student that curries favors," says the DAILY BRUIN.
Mickey for Pres.
In connection with their campaign. Mouse constituents have challenged other presidential candidates to an open debate. "We don't need a man to do a mouse's job," commented one of the Mouse campaign managers.
Rally Rhymsters
Sound
(ACP)—The Ohio State LANTERN exchange column brings word of a delegation of more than 1,000 participants in a picket line and rally in Harlem. The group included students from New York University.
Many of those who participated in the picket line intermittently chanted: "One . . . two . . . three . . . four; don't go into Woolworth's store. Five . . . six . . . seven . . . eight; southern Woolworths segregate."
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