Michael Smerconish ’14: Nearly eight months after the incident itself, Harvard administrators issued demands for roughly 70 students to withdraw as a result of last May’s cheating scandal.
Michael D. Smith, a Harvard dean, broke the news via a school wide email in what Harvard’s newspaper, the Crimson labeled, “Harvard’s first substantive announcement about the status of the Government 1310 cheating scandal since the massive investigation was first announced last August.”
Harvard’s Administrative Board clarified that a required withdrawal is not the same as expulsion, but rather entails a mandatory two to four semester suspension from school. Tuition for these semesters will be completely refunded.
Although Harvard has still not acknowledged the course in question, students were forced to withdraw, another approximately 25 received disciplinary probation.
The class’ professor, Michael B. Platt, turned to Harvard administration for assistance last May after noticing a shocking degree of similarity among some take-home final exams. According to the New York Times, “some students supplied identical answers, down to, in some cases, typographical errors, indicating that they had written them together or plagiarized them.”
To help sort through the large class and the overwhelming stack of exam material, Harvard hired outside officials to begin an investigation that one administrator deemed “unprecedented in living memory.” The group used a “color-coding” system, according to the New York Times, to highlight similarities among multiple papers.
At least one student, however, has claimed that the similarities in their exams was due to the collaborative environment that was apparently encouraged by both course professors and teaching assistants.
Thomas Sternberg, Harvard alum, parent of a student at Harvard, and founder of Staples, believes that the fault did not lie with the students but rather with the professor and administration.
“If the message was so clearly expressed, why did some of the teaching fellows go over the exam in open session,” Sternberg noted. “If they did not get the message, could one expect the students to understand it?”
Sternberg, like many others, also shared his frustration over the duration of the public investigation itself.
Sternberg stated, “If you challenge the entire faculty at the Harvard Business School and the Harvard Law School to come up with a process that took more time, cost more money, embarrassed more innocent students, and vindicated guilty faculty … that could not have outdone the process that took place.”
The school has yet to distinguish between the collaboration that was encouraged in the course and the type used on the exam. Harvard spokespeople have refused to comment on whether or not an investigation was conducted into the possible mixed signals given by faculty.
In all, the scandal has “given a black eye to one of the world’s great educational institutions,” according to the New York Times. Dean Smith noted that the school has learned from the incident and plans to “redouble our efforts” to create an environment of academic integrity.
While the school hopes to move on and strengthen its Committee on Academic Integrity, which was ironically established only ten months before the incident, the event and punishment has had a devastating impact on the students themselves. Robert Peabody, an attorney representing two of the accused students, contends that it was “death by a thousand nicks. For the students who decided to stay on and fight the allegations, it was living torture.”