Right Wing Nation

For the moment, let’s put aside the ethical questions of cheating. Let’s also forget for the moment the irony of cheating on an exam in an ethics course. Thanks to University Diaries, I saw this NYT article, and want to focus on the institutional angle. Just in case you missed it, here is what happened:

Cheating is not unheard of on university campuses. But cheating on an open-book, take-home exam in a pass-fail course seems odd, and all the more so in a course about ethics.

Yet Columbia’s Graduate School of Journalism is looking into whether students may have cheated on the final exam in just such a course, “Critical Issues in Journalism.” According to the school’s Web site, the course “explores the social role of journalism and the journalist from legal, historical, ethical, and economic perspectives,” with a focus on ethics.

Nicholas Lemann, dean of the journalism school, said that students had to sign on to a Columbia Web site to gain access to the exam, and that once they did, had 90 minutes to write a couple of essays. But he was unwilling to detail how the cheating might have occurred.

Okay. So we have a graduate course in journalistic ethics, and students cheat on the exam. That’s what everybody else in the blogosphere is zooming in on. But I kept reading:

“We have encountered a serious problem with the final exam, and will not register a passing grade in the course for anyone who does not attend,” David A. Klatell, vice dean at the school, wrote in an e-mail message, which was forwarded to a reporter by a student. Mr. Klatell did not respond to several telephone and e-mail requests for comment.

Mr. Lemann said that he was surprised that students might have been concerned about how they scored on the pass-fail exam, and that exams and grades at the school were rare.

There is something very wrong here. First, recall that this is a graduate course — not only a graduate course, but a required course for all graduate students in the journalism school. When a faculty member gives a pass/fail exam in a course, he sends a very clear message that he does not take either the exam or the course seriously, even if that is not the message he intends to convey. That’s how the students hear it. So we have a faculty member giving a pass/fail exam in a required, graduate course in Columbia’s graduate journalism program.

Autonomy is not absolute at the university, not even for the most highly regarded, most powerful faculty. I wondered how the faculty member was allowed by his department to get away with offering a pass/fail exam, until I read this:

“We are not a very grade-intensive institution,” he said. “Our school is run on a pass-fail basis.”

And there we have not only the answer to my question above, but the tumor itself. The whole school — a graduate program — is pass/fail.

You may be thinking, “So what?” But when a university (or a school, college, or department within a university) designates a course as pass/fail, it is making a statement about the academic worth of the course: Namely, that it is academically worthless. This department is sending that message about itself to its students, that its courses (and its degrees) are academically worthless. And this is very, very wrong.

Understand, I’m not defending the students who cheated. Cheating is reprehensible. However, if the school itself sends the clear message that it doesn’t take the course seriously, and that is courses and its degrees are academically worthless, why in the world would we expect the students to take the course or the exam seriously? Why not cheat, if it’s a worthless course and the school doesn’t take it seriously?

I find this disturbing.