Up to 78 Air Force Academy cadets cheated on an online calculus test by getting help during the exam from a website, the academy said Wednesday.
Most of the cadets took responsibility for their actions and have begun a six-month remediation program, a type of academic probation, said Lt. Col. John Bryan, an academy spokesman.
Bryan did not know how many cadets have been ordered to take the remediation program. Some are still awaiting their turn before an honor board.
If cadets deny cheating but the academy determines they did cheat, they could be expelled, he said.
"Are they going to make mistakes? You bet," Bryan said. "But we expect them to own up to it."
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Send them to Afghanistan.
ReplyDeleteAs Army privates.
With defective weapons.
We already do that to the good ones!
DeleteAs a Reserve Navy officer who taught at the Naval Academy a few years ago, I can assure most folks and especially anyone reading this blog that this sort of behavior is the exception rather than the norm. Most of the midshipmen I taught were decent, hardworking and honorable. Currently, cheating is more common in society at large and that our service academies reflect society in both good ways and bad.
ReplyDeleteCan you remediate honor and integrity? I know that, at Annapolis, the level of accountability for transgressors is pretty steep; the same behavior from a student at a large state university might not even be refered for action. At USNA, failing a class means meeting with your advisor and then having an academic board meet to determine if the student in question should be retained or dismissed from the college. Also, before anyone starts yelling, "off with their heads!!", consider that the taxpayers are on the hook for about $70K/year and expulsion might mean that those funds are never recovered.
To quote Dennis Miller, "Of course, that's just my opinion. I could be wrong."
Speaking as a taxpayer, though not one of yours, I think I'd rather write off the $70K than graduate someone about whose competence and honesty there was real doubt.
DeleteAir Farce -- what can you expect?
ReplyDeleteOK. I'm a graduate of one of the rival academies, all of which have had their problems with honor code violations from time to time, so I have a bit at stake here. Whenever you have cheating going on on a large scale like this, you have a command problem in addition to the moral problem of individual cheaters.
Will heads roll in the chain-of-command? I doubt it, but we'll see. I'm not surprised that the command is a bunch of pussies without balls enough to kick all of the cheaters out.
Air Farce -- what can you expect?
Dear WW, given that women do now serve in all branches of the Armed Forces, and are allowed to vote and stuff even, if not to earn equal pay or even receive equal medical care, I'll rephrase that for you as
Delete"I'm not surprised that the command is a bunch of assholes without 'nads enough to kick all the cheaters out". This preserves the profanity but is gender-neutral (since women have gonads too).
I hit the roof two semesters ago when I overheard one of our tutors telling a student: "My commanding officer in the Navy told me that if you AREN'T cheating, then you are working too hard."
ReplyDeleteIs it wrong to think that those who are charged with defending our country ought to be held to even greater standards then those who are not?
ReplyDeleteNot really, but I always found it helpful to remember that my midshipmen were still 18-19 years old and some of them weren't all that mature in spite of other accomplishments. At the same time I also had Marines in my classes that had already seen intense combat in garden spots like Fallujah and there wasn't a lot I could tell them about what works when the enemy is trying to kill you. I could always emphasize good science and military applications of chemistry, but in my experience, it wasn't the students that had seen action were the ones behaving poorly; rather, the students who were still searching for themselves were the ones who could be more easily tempted to make poor choices.
DeleteAlso, the students at the service academies are POTENTIAL officers: they don't have their commissions yet and things like lying and cheating can have "a chilling effect" on the final commissioning boards. A midshipman on his or her summer cruise isn't exactly likely to have their hands on classified material nor are they going to be leading troops in Iraq. They are still students, still 20ish, and still young. I found their general conduct to be enormously more polite and respectfull than I generally encounter from my current crop of undergrads.
Fair enough. It's just that I am working with my *kindergartener* on not cheating and lying.
DeleteI was rather astounded as this, from the article:
ReplyDelete"Cadets were allowed to use the website involved for homework but were told ahead of time that it was off-limits during the test, Bryan said.
Cadets took the test on their own, outside the classroom and without supervision. The test will no longer be given online, he said."
I realize that these cadets have an Honor Code that they're supposed to follow, but that's still no reason to set up the test in such a way as to make it so damn easy for them to cheat. Of course some of them are going to cheat if they think they can get away with it.
While I blame the students for cheating, I also think the college was incredibly stupid to set up the test in this way.
I must disagree.
DeletePerhaps it's set up that way to catch the cheaters. One definition of character is doing the right thing when no one is looking. A mature, responsible per does the right thing because it IS the right thing.
The service academies aren't tied to retention quotas, and therefore can deal with plagiarists and cheaters the way civilian universities should.
Air Force Academy.... Isn't that the one with the hard-core Christianist culture? How's that working out?
ReplyDeleteAs one who served for a long time (as both enlisted and officer).....this pisses me off. Those on their way to commissioning (whether via a service academy, ROTC, OCS or from the ranks) ALL get emphasis on the "special trust and confidence" that will arrive with commissioning. Some of this that they expected to execute are special indeed: weapon systems of all flavors, the lives of their troops, the safety of aircraft and ships. Other versions are less sophisticated, and often comes down to simple good manners: do what your asked, meet deadlines, send thank you notes, respect positional authority even if you dislike the person in the position...
ReplyDeleteKids who take shortcuts in the school will take them in the field or fleet. The best worst case is that they will hurt themselves. The worst worst case is that they will hurt others...or fan the flames of international incident.
The Air Force is looking at major reductions in forces right now. It can start with these asshats.
I just want to say that these cheating scandals "rock" the service academies every 5 or 10 or 15 years, people complain, some cadets are expelled, AND EVERYBODY FORGETS.
ReplyDeleteNot me.
As far as I can tell, the first big cheating scandal was during the Nixon tail of the Vietnam War, I think 1971 or `72. May have been at the Air Force Academy or West Point. The tests were changed, some cadets were canned, some newspaper ink spilled. I remember reading about a contemporary cheating scandal at Annapolis in "Rolling Stone" in the late 1990s; it went into bloody detail about how the JAG investigators ran a perfect KGB-style interrogation (minus the standing closet and the lack of food, water, and sleep), the guy whose hair fell out from the stress and grew back as gray fluff (and this was before the cheating began!), etc. They got their men, the cadets were sent through the Bilger's Gate, and that was that.
So remember this: these scandals have happened before and they will happen again.
I checked that Encyclopaedia Internetica; Wikipedia says that the first big cheating scandal was at the USAFA in 1967.
DeleteI blame "Manos: The Hands of Fate."