L.C. Smith reports most academic violations of SU colleges

By: Fred Hintz

Posted: 9/23/08

L.C. Smith College of Engineering and Computer Science had the most academic integrity violations of any college in Syracuse University last year, according to a report by the Office of Academic Integrity released last week.

L.C. Smith reported 37 violations, up from two violations in last year's report.

The annual report provides data on student academic violations. Violations university-wide rose 2 percent, and the frequency of certain types of violations drastically changed. Improper use of sources infractions went down more than 50 percent, from 80 to 39 percent, while course work and research violations such as cheating on exams jumped from 34 to 85 percent.

This is the third year the SU Office of Academic Integrity has existed, after replacing the offices previously operated by each individual college. The concept behind the university-wide Office of Academic Integrity is to allow faculty members to report violations to the university instead of keeping academic integrity issues between the professors and students, said Ruth Stein, interim director of the office.

Can Isik, L.C. Smith's dean of student affairs, said the college didn't see the large jump in violations as alarming, because it was caused by an isolated incident in a single course. A large number of students collaborated on a project, and the instructor reported a violation for each of the students individually, he said.

The College of Arts and Sciences reported 30 violations, and the Martin J. Whitman School of Management reported 25 violations.

L.C. Smith was not the only school to report a rise in the number of violations. The College of Visual and Performing Arts, the S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications and Whitman also reported increases.

Graduate students accounted for 44 of the 130 violations.

John Dannenhoffer, a professor in L.C. Smith, said these statistics might be high only because SU is "pretty good about putting mechanisms in place to detect cheating." He said he was surprised L.C. Smith's statistics were the worst.

"At this point, we haven't done an evaluation, and we haven't done any research to support any kind of conclusion yet," Stein said.

Stein said the violations students should look out for are collaborating on individual assignments, unintentional plagiarism and using the same paper for more than one assignment.

The report outlines the measures taken by the Office of Academic Integrity to prevent cheating among students. They include a university subscription to Turnitin.com, a service that recognizes plagiarized material from student papers and citation workshops at SU's Writing Center.

fahintz@syr.edu