125 Harvard undergraduates are set to appear in front of the university’s administration after collaborating on a spring take home final exam.
Jay Harris, Harvard’s dean of undergraduate education, explained that the students had copied off one another and worked to come up with short answer responses and content on an essay assignment.
A teaching fellow for the class first detected signs of academic dishonesty while grading a subset of the exams. The responses were “too close for comfort,” as Harris described, which prompted Harvard’s Administrative Board to conduct an investigation that lasted through the summer.
Some of the 125 students may avoid punishment altogether, but many could face up to a year-long suspension.
Harvard President Drew Faust has come forward to describe the students’ actions as “totally unacceptable behavior that betrays the trust upon which intellectual inquiry at Harvard depends.”
She also added that “there is work to be done to ensure that every student at Harvard understands and embraces the values that are fundamental to its community of scholars.”
The university is determined to implement preventative measures to discourage students from cheating. There is even talk of instituting an academic honor code, which Harvard has long resisted.
While the last known Ivy League cheating scandal took place in 2000 at Dartmouth, other elite universities have been under fire during the last few years for academic dishonesty.
In 2007, 24 students at Duke University’s Fuqua School of Business were either suspended or expelled after collaborating on a take-home exam. A similar incident had occurred in 2002 at the University of Virginia, which expelled 48 students who plagiarized their physics term papers.Â