Two-thirds of my class colluded. Should I report them to the academic offences committee?

Question

I teach a module in an electrical engineering MSc programme in the UK for which the students are given a technical project that carries 25% of the total marks. The project is a group assignment and the students work in teams of 3-4 members.

This year, four out of six teams submitted identical assignments (the only differences were their names on the cover page).

In our school, we are expected to flag cases of suspected plagiarism and collusion to an internal academic offences committee. If I do that, the most likely scenario is that they will all get a zero mark in this assignment.

My main concern is that if this happens, the module will have a very high failure rate. These students will need to score at least 75% in the final exam and taking into account their progress hitherto (which has been disappointingly poor), it is more likely for a camel to... pass the module.

Moreover, I expect that the committee will rule that all students get a zero - both the ones who copied the answers, and the one(s) who provided them. At least this was the case last year when a similar case of collusion was taken to the academic offences committee. I'm not sure this is fair to those students who spend time and effort to do the assignment.

Some months ago I had a chat with a colleague, who suggested that there's a cultural aspect to the students' understanding of the concepts of collusion and plagiarism - an opinion that I also found in this blog post by TurnitIn and this paper that is cited therein. I'm mentioning this because the students who colluded in my class are all international. Although I'm not convinced by the idea that they may simply not understand that copying an other team's assignment is wrong (they are MSc students after all), I can acknowledge that I may be missing something. I should mention that at the beginning of the semester, there was a series of induction events in which we tried to define very clearly the concepts of plagiarism and collusion.

An additional complication is that high failure rates are frowned upon in our department. It's an unwritten rule that the ideal failure rate is 0% and I'm already feeling pressure from the other modules I teach where I get ~15% failures every year. This is also a new module and I don't want it to have a bad reputation.

My question is: should I should report them to the academic offences committee given that they will fail my module and as a result the MSc? If so, they will have the right to resit the final exam in October, but they'll still need to score >75%. My other option is to turn a blind eye (in principle we do that for minor infractions), but I don't think this is right. Besides, it may give them the message that they'll pass the final exam even if they don't put in any effort. I do not have the option to give them some other punishment without referring them to the committee.

Update: Many thanks for your answers. Today I reported this to the academic offences committee. I presented all the evidence to the committee, but I will not participate in the investigation, which I believe is fair. I think the university has unequivocally communicated its regulations regarding academic offences, so as @Allure wrote dura lex sed lex. In my opinion it is both partonising and condescending to suggest that international students should be treated differently or more leniently and even that they cannot understand what collusion is; they have the right to chose to collude and should face the consequences. I do have some concerns about the severity of the consequences, but as it stands, these are the rules. Lastly - and this is a more philosophical question that has nothing to do with blatant verbatim copying - I wonder whether there is indeed a significant difference "across cultures," but this is a different topic altogether.

Answer 1

In our school, we are expected to flag cases of suspected plagiarism and collusion to an internal academic offences committee.

There's your answer. It's your job to report the offense.

Answer 2

You should. Dura lex sed lex. Not reporting it sends the message that plagiarism is OK if enough people do it.

The grim consequences you envisage (like departmental disapproval) might not come to pass - after all you can't control if your students decide to cheat. Conversely, I would feel disturbed if the instructor passed cheating students to avoid high failure rates.

As for the students failing the MSc because you failed them in your module, to quote from an answer to another question:

Sometimes a student's failure is a teaching success.

The lesson is just not the one you wished that you were teaching.

Answer 3

The way I see it, my employer pays me to evaluate my students’ knowledge of the material I taught them. I am ethically bound to give only grades that reflect my honest assessment.

In particular, if an assignment is turned in that I know to be plagiarized, I cannot in good faith give it a grade of more than zero. The student who submitted it has not credibly demonstrated any knowledge, so to do otherwise would be a betrayal of the trust my institution places in me to carry out the job I was assigned to do.

The distinction between students who copied and students who allowed others to copy from them is a bogus one. Both are cheaters, and in practice it is usually impossible to know to which of these two categories a student belongs. There is no logical policy other than to treat all students who participated in such a collusion scheme as if they cheated and did not do the assignment, even if in fact some of them did.

The allowance you are thinking of making for “cultural” values of “international” students is disrespectful to honest students, who hail from all different countries, including the same geographical regions as the cheating students who supposedly have a misguided understanding of what plagiarism is. You should treat people as individuals, who are adults capable of making their own decisions and need to live with the consequences of those decisions.

The argument that reporting the cheating students will result in a high failure rate is neither here nor there. Perhaps your program needs to do some soul searching about what they might be doing that results in such massive cheating scandals occurring (and the high failure rate that follows them), and what they can be doing to prevent them in the future. But it’s not your place as an individual instructor to take such high-level questions into account and substitute your own personal justice for whatever the institutional policies say needs to happen in such a situation.

Answer 4

Yes, you should report them. It's the official policy, and it's also the right thing to do. It helps you by spreading out the responsibility for the failures (or whatever). Given the academic level and introductory anti-cheating module, it's overwhelmingly likely that these students have been cheating through their entire academic career, and have grown accustomed to being given a pass every time in this same fashion.

As I wrote in this answer:

If these are university students, then it seems to me overwhelmingly likely that what's happened is a reflection of prior habits they've been following for... maybe 12+ years now? I'd say at this point it's naive to think this is truly "the first offense". What if these students are cheating at work in every single one of their college courses, and then pleading "first offense" or "didn't know" (very common, and should be disregarded as utterly unbelievable), and so are given this allowance continually throughout their program sequence?

Answer 5

Something doesn't add up: Obviously, the students didn't think what they did was forbidden because they didn't try to hide the fact that the papers were identical. Probably, because they were supposed to cooperate to begin with, they falsely assumed it's OK to cooperate across groups. As with most misunderstandings the fault may not be exclusively on one side, which is the reason for my suggestion:

Have a session where you explain the rules in unambiguous terms. If there is a language barrier or something similar, make them take a 5 minute test afterwards that lets them decide whether a few choice scenarios are proper behavior or not.

Invalidate the project for all those who submitted the identical results. Have them retake an equivalent assignment or, if that's impossible due to time constraint or lab hours etc., an exam. Make it optional for the others, for fairness, to participate in the replacement project/test if they wish to improve their grades.

Answer 6

I know you already reported this (which I think was the right thing to do), but for future readers, let me take another angle on this. Specifically, I'd like to focus on this paragraph:

Moreover, I expect that the committee will rule that all students get a zero - both the ones who copied the answers, and the one(s) who provided them. At least this was the case last year when a similar case of collusion was taken to the academic offences committee. I'm not sure this is fair to those students who spend time and effort to do the assignment.

That being said, would it be fair to the students that were punished last year if these students received no penalty whatsoever for an identical offense? Policies need to be enforced uniformly (or not at all) to avoid arbitrariness.

It would also be unfair to the two teams that completed their own work, because the 3 teams that evidently put forth no effort whatsoever would be graded as if they had actually done the assignment.

Answer 7

A few things:

• it is important to report it, even if there is no punishment past "they have to redo the assignment and not collude" (which is more work for you of course) - reason being, there are serial cheaters and they "get by" by apologizing profusely if caught
• no matter what they do, it will likely be more work for you OR you will be completely disillusioned (which happened to me when I reported multiple cheating incidents and they said "you didn't say explicitly they couldn't copy"...)
• glad you actually care
• finally, give them slightly different assignments - 3 vs. 4 variables, 100 vs. 200 ohm resistors, whatever. It's a little more annoying to grade, but if they collude to get the right answers, they should be learning something!

Answer 8

Yes, absolutely without question. In fact, I've seen situations where the majority of the class cheated. It's not pretty, but it's been done before.

This isn't playground hair-pulling or petty vengeance, academic integrity is sacred and it's right to report it.

Answer 9

I totally agree with the other answers, you should definitely report this.

An aspect of the situation which I think other posts did not mention: you don't actually know that two-thirds colluded.

The project is a group assignment and the students work in teams of 3-4 members.

This year, four out of six teams submitted identical assignments (the only differences were their names on the cover page).

It is very easy to not cheat when you work alone. When you are in a team of 3 or 4, your work will be plagiarised if there is one rogue team member. This can happen without your knowledge.

So, the most you can say, is that there is at least 1 person in each group who colluded with others.

It seems to me that it is unreasonable to assign 25% of the total marks for a group project, and then get punished for plagiarism, when the University cannot prove that every individual was aware of what is going on. You cannot expect from each team member to evaluate whether another team member's contribution is original or plagiarised.

My undergraduate Physics course included a part when 3-4 students worked together, but that project carried less than 0.5% of total marks, which I think is reasonable. 25% is ludicrous.

Nevertheless, this is not your problem. If you can influence these aspects of the course in the future, I would advise you to do so. Report collusion.

Answer 10

I see you've already taken action so this comment is late. Something for you and others to consider maybe is:

• You are correct this work should be graded zero.

• However maybe you could give them an opportunity to remedy their error?

• Reject the plagiarised work, and give them a stern talking to, explaining why you have rejected it, and explaining that they were warned and should know better.

• Give them a tight new deadline to redo the work to the proper standard and resubmit. Explain the consequences if this is not done. Explain that they are on the edge of being banned from the university (or whatever the likely max punishment would be from the Academic Offences Committee).

• Keep your line manager / Department Head informed of this and your actions.

• Likely they will still fail the course, but at least you gave them a chance to remedy their errors and they have learned from this.

Answer 11

If 2/3 colluded and they were all international students, then that is proof that this was due to misunderstanding. When I had to do experimental work at university, the set-up was that we had to work in groups of two, a report was to be written and we would be be graded based on the report. But it was then one report per group of two students, the grade applied to both students and usually one student would write most of the report. This sort of a system is common practice in many universities, so this may be the source of the misunderstanding.

Answer 12

...copying an other team's assignment is wrong.

tl;dr;

It might help you decide what to do by considering deeply what you mean by "wrong". AFAIK, there is nothing Biblical (or Koranical, or [insert totally objective moral dogma here]) that governs your behavior in this specific scenario. Will reporting them to the university office create a situation that is more "right", in your view? Will doing something else create a situation that is more "right"? Ultimately, your ethical system is yours, and as an educator you should really make an attempt to navigate these waters for yourself (with some aid, perhaps, from other stackoverflowers).

tfa

Probably, it is not the case that you consider plagiarism to be a moral error in-and-of itself. Often, I find that educators have vague notions that individual plagiarism causes some further inherent ill much later (e.g. at time of employment), or slippery-slope logic leads to a conclusion that plagiarism can cause class-wide problems. There are possibly other considerations that are valid, for example this answer implies that if you give your word to do a thing (possibly implicitly by accepting payment for a job), then it would be inherently wrong to not do that thing. I would consider this valid. You may or may not be of this opinion. However, many academic positions give a great deal of leeway to professors when deciding how to implement policies in their classes, so this consideration may not even apply.

Personally, my strongest ethical motivator is that I feel that knowledge of science is an inherent good. As a science educator, this implies for me an ethical responsibility to educate. Perhaps more strongly, I feel an ethical responsibility to educate despite what my educatees may or may not want. If I have taken on the duty to educate student X, and student X doesn't want to be educated, then this does not relieve me of my duty to educate them.

In this context, if student X is utilizing plagiarism to shirk their studies, then I feel ethically bound to take steps to prevent (!=punish) this thing. What steps to take? If pursuing a particular course of action regarding their plagiarism will cause student X to, for example, be expelled from the program, then I would want to consider carefully my actions. Possibly this will open a spot for another student who will actually learn, allowing me to fulfill my duty to educate. Possibly such an open spot will only be filled by a student with similar habits, in which case I would want to find a method that would actually prevent these actions rather than simply flunking a never-ending cycle of plagiaristic students.

In this same context, it may be the case that student X is diligently pursuing their studies, but is simply using plagiarism as a tool to pass a class that they may otherwise not be able to pass, or to get an "A" having actually "earned" a "B". In this case, pursuing an action that would cause student X to be ejected from the program would be antithetical to my duty to educate, and would therefore, in my ethical system, be wrong. I may have other ethical duties due to official university policies requiring me to sort students by ability with maximum efficiency and accuracy. To me, these are secondary to my ethical duty to educate.

As such, if I were in your scenario, I would have some delving to do. Is it actually the case that these students were utterly incapable of completing the assignment? If so, then this assignment probably isn't very educational (which is the primary purpose of assignments, IMHO). Perhaps I should give a different assignment to replace it. Is it actually the case that students are simply shirking their studies? If so, then perhaps I should re-assign the same or a similar assignment of comparable difficulty, letting students know that they must actually be diligent in their studies. Have these students been shirking their studies repeatedly, even after similar attempts to encourage them to diligence? Then perhaps these students are simply lost, and you should report them to the appropriate department so that they can be replaced with students who will actually attempt to learn.

All of this is not to say that you should follow this suit. This is simply to say that perhaps the ethics of the situation are not so simple as to admit a black-and-white answer. Or perhaps they are. Since you will be dealing with this ethical conundrum for years to come, you should really make efforts to come to a system that you find ethically consistent.