How did you come to this conclusion?
I believe in consequences, but I am neither a professional educator nor a veteran of any armed forces. I would defer to the head of this institution to arrive at an appropriate decision.
In my opinion this should probably result in dismissal (depending on exact circumstance which I'm not privy to).
The main issue here is demonstration of a lack of character. You give in to temptation to take the easy way out. That might be not doing the proper maintenance on a vehicle, or maybe not going exactly through the checklist before you take off for a flight, or maybe you take a shortcut and think "you got it" before that recon mission, or maybe you don't quite make sure someone's gear is up to standard and it fails on them and kills them.
Once you start taking shortcuts, you tend to keep taking them until it results in a colossal screw-up.
When I got out of the army it actually took me a few years to get away from the "triple-checking" anxiety. Do I have my car keys? Ok. Wait do I have my keys? Ok good.
"walking to my car"
Do I have my keys? Ok hand is on the keys and I can feel them.
Etc.
Cheating means you'll eventually screw that up and forget your keys. Then you or someone else dies.
For example, watching yourself slip down the class ranking while knowing those ahead of you are cheating can be discouraging. Especially if you think it's being ignored. A few months of that might test your character pretty hard.
The fact that the cheating isn't literally universal does suggest that specific people are knowingly making bad choices while others decide to rise above temptation and make the right choices. That is on them, and they should accept the consequences. Full stop.
If what you say is a character test, then one should expect almost everyone in college to be dirty somehow.
As someone who worked their ass off, graduated with first class honours and never cheated, rewarding cheating devalues the grades of honest students. It's absolutely unfair, and it needs properly policing. Good academics don't need to cheat.
There is huge pressure not to fail people, and it is incredibly difficult to actually fail--I know only of a small handful of instances. In one case, they basically didn't show up for six months on a 1 year masters and did zero work, and even then it took months of handwringing to actually kick them out. But it shouldn't require months of agonising if the rules are clear and consistently and fairly enforced. The problem is that they are in a thrall to rich overseas students' cash, and they don't want to rock the boat. They even have special dumbed down Masters courses which are strictly for overseas students only. An academic friend of mine who was a fellow PhD student teaches on one, and he wasn't happy at the standard of the course or the academic conduct of the students. If they were on a regular course they should mostly have failed. And there's also the issue of league tables--being lax in grading and punishing cheating gets you a higher ranking in the league tables, so there's a strong disincentive to have high standards.
At this point, I do think that universities need some sort of external intervention. If standards are to be upheld, academic misconduct must result in real consequences, i.e. being kicked out. Most universities have a session on academic misconduct for all new students, and they have to sign a statement saying they understand what academic misconduct is and that they understand that it is not permitted. That needs enforcing properly, no second chances. As for cheating on coursework, there's a simple answer to that: go back to closed examinations for all courses, and make the coursework component a minor part or remove it entirely. And structure the coursework to minimise cheating. For example, make every student's work unique so there is no possibility of using anyone else's work. As a scientist, lab work and written work were usually your own experiments and essays, so little chance for cheating.
The real test for the cheaters is when they later have to perform in the real world. There is usually a clear difference between motivated and competent people who are independent thinkers and doers and lazy chancers who struggle, and it's quickly apparent which category people fall into despite their paper qualifications and CVs. Whether you're in a university or a company, there are people you can rely on who know their stuff and can deliver, and the people who can't.
I think the solution is as you say -- make assignments that are hard to cheat on -- but also reduce the incentive to cheat. Just make it less important. High-stakes closed exams and emphasis on ranking students will certainly make cheating worse.
In one university, absolutely everything was assessed, every bit of lab work, every tutorial, the lot. Unfortunately, this means you're being assessed on lab work which might fail due to your inexperience, and it makes it unnecessarily stressful.
In another, the lab work and tutorials were almost never assessed. They were learning exercises, which you could try and fail at without any consequences. I found that you learned a lot more here, because you could try stuff out and fail without it affecting anything, and it was much less stressful.
In the latter university, you did three modules per term (~10 weeks) and you had a closed exam for each every term. New paper set every year. No coursework. No chance for cheating.
The exams were also not "high-stakes". Each one made up a small percentage of the course total, which increased through the three years of the course, so there was no problem with doing badly on one or more. It meant the term time was pretty much all about learning, with assessment right at the end. I'm very much in favour of this simplicity, and it makes academic misconduct almost impossible.
Exactly like this, I donno.
But in spirit isn't the academy kind of officers basic training? And anyone who went thru basic knows that the recruits do the dumbest imaginable things and the drill sgts slowly and laboriously socialize them into being competent military personnel.
Fresh off the bus recruits at basic can get away with the dumbest things imaginable, things that would instantly chapter a MOSQ soldier out of a line unit. Think of the stupidest thing you ever saw a recruit do with a rifle WRT common sense safety or maintenance requirements. Dumb lapses of discipline, incredible lack of foresight, etc.
Frankly not much is expected of new 2nd LTs other than shut up, stay out of the way, and listen carefully to your platoon Sgt. Officers have a VERY slow and long maturation period compared to enlisted. Enlisted experience is here's a couple months to get MOSQ and then sink or swim.
Not that basic trainees get away with being dumb, that's kinda the point. The officer cadets have just earned the most epic extra duty imaginable for a long time.
The lack of quality officers was, and still is, one of the most egregious failings I encountered throughout my service.
The Army tried this, a cadet was killed, and the program ended (as far as I'm aware) [1].
>The lack of quality officers was, and still is, one of the most egregious failings I encountered throughout my service.
Speaking as a (former) officer, I can't disagree, it was the reason I left. My personal opinion is that USMA/USNA/USAFA spend way, way too much time trying to pretend that they're "just another University", and not an institution that explicitly exists to do one thing: produce leaders for war.
[1] https://www.stwnewspress.com/news/faith-honor-and-sacrifice-...
There are people in the academy that did not get caught and will, in your conclusion, take even bigger shortcuts.
However, these cadets have possibly learned a painful lesson that they can always use a reminder to do the right thing.
Let them be significantly punished, and know this was an excellent bootcamp following the Honor Code.
> Once you start taking shortcuts, you tend to keep taking them until it results in a colossal screw-up.
So maybe for educational purposes academy needs to provoke cadets to take shortcuts and to make them into a colossal screw-ups?
Educational environment is not a "real life". Their goal was to pass exam on calculus. They did everything they were able to do, including the cheating. It is the cheating in educational environment, in real life it would not be the cheating, it would be a healthy cooperation. Or maybe not so healthy, because they screwed it up, by sharing not right answers, but mistakes. It is hard to judge, because there is such thing as a psychological narrative, there is a psychological context for all this. Each cheated cadet had his own context, his own story that came to a cheating.
In a high school I was ready to share my homework with my friends, and sometimes I got unacceptable marks because a teacher was able to see cheating and marked all with low grades. I got low marks not because I cheated, because I helped others to cheat. Was I demonstrating a lack of character, or a high morale character, who was ready to take additional risks to help his friends? It depends on my own narrative. From the one hand, it might be a lack of character, due to inability to say "no" to my friends. From the other hand, my friends might be more important for me than my grades. (Really I don't know what it was, because I know that I have troubles with saying "no", and at the same time I never bothered with grades, I knew that I would manage something acceptable, especially in math, I was good at it).
This anecdote here is an attempt to demonstrate that it is hard sometimes to judge character by assessing behavior only. It is even more hard on artificial educational environment where rules could arbitrarily diverge from real life.
I very much agree with this point. I think the messaging that is being handed to students is very different than what happens in professional settings. Students are often given the message that they are on their own and if something is not achievable it is their own fault, with consequences being their own. There are very little outlets for students to ask for help, or changes in school workload. I have seen the cause of too much work to do and too little time with no feedback from professors as causing this kind of widespread cheating.
Once you reach a professional environment with high risk (note, I have not been in the military but have worked on national defense aerospace programs) the messaging becomes if you are unsure of something or feel pressured to let something give you MUST ask for help or changes because the consequences are not your own and can be very widespread.
Edit: grammar
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> I would defer to the head of this institution to arrive at an appropriate decision.
Blind faith in institutions here (and anywhere) is what enables mass institutional failure. Whether it's producing subpart military officers and the all the negative consequences that has, or the sex abuse scandal in the Catholic Church, or a slide toward tyranny in representative political institutions.
* You don't know the math and people die
* You cheat and you create an international incident. You either go to jail or people die because of the decisions you make.