Any intentional act \to claim effort for the work or efforts of another without authorization or citation"" is academic misconduct, according to UW-Madison academic misconduct policy. This includes signing friends' names on attendance sheets for classes and ""helping"" students with online or take-home quizzes.
Using this policy as a framework, five UW-Madison students are campaigning for academic integrity on campus.
The Bateman Competition, a special topics class offered by the UW-Madison School of Journalism, is a project sponsored by the Public Relations Society of America that requires students to solve a campus problem.
The group members found there were 75 reported cheating incidents during the 2003-'04 academic year, but according to UW-Madison senior and group leader Stephanie Simon, up to three times that amount of students cheated and were not caught.
""The ratio is astounding and I think it's perpetuated by the fact that it's a relatively taboo thing to talk about,"" Simon said. ""I don't think any university wants to associate itself with academic misconduct.""
The group's research also discovered an unspoken student code that claims cheating is acceptable if it benefits a student's friends or family members, according to Simon.
""The amount of people that are included in an individual person's network of it being okay to cheat increases throughout their years here,"" Simon said.
The four-credit, year-long class began research in October and officially launched its campaign Feb. 23, with a presentation to the Student Advocacy and Judicial Affairs committee in the Dean of Students Office.
""I think the group did a great job,"" UW-Madison Associate Dean of Students Lori Berquam said.
Recommendations by the students to SAJA included revision of the committee's website and the implementation of a UW-Madison honor code.
""I think [the revision] is something that we'll definitely want to try,"" Berquam said, to increase the website's user-friendliness and availability of information from other Big Ten Conference school websites about their academic misconduct policies.
""[An honor code] speaks to the integrity of the university, especially this university, with its reputation of being an institution of research,"" Simon said.
The group took a three-pronged approach in raising awareness of academic misconduct on campus, according to UW-Madison junior and group member Traci Swartz.
Two websites, www.madcheaterz.com and www.journalism.wisc.edu/bateman, are now available for campus-wide perusal, the former geared toward students and the latter supplying information on academic misconduct to professors and faculty members.
Although the campaign emphasizes the fact that cheating is an underreported statistic, Berquam said UW-Madison takes measures annually to train professors to spot cheating.
""I think it's just another continued effort at recognizing that academic misconduct continues to happen on campus,"" Berquam said.
