If At First You Don't Succeed (in cheating), Try, Try Again
If At First You Don't Succeed (in cheating), Try, Try Again
Our Leaders teach us and our students a valuable lesson
A couple of years ago, UMass Boston rolled out a “restorative justice in academic dishonesty” plan. As one of our early (and eerily prophetic) posts pointed out, nobody at the upper administration really knew what it meant, despite their attempts to cheat us into believing otherwise. When this became clear, they quietly stopped mentioning the subject except in some vague guidelines…
Only to come back again, in full force, and relaunch a “campus-wide initiative aimed at rethinking our institutional approach to academic integrity”. If at first you don't succeed, try, try again.
The campus-wide email, sent on April 13, is already a master-class in cheating. It promises that:
Such revisions are not intended to override faculty or department autonomy, and we are not aiming to mandate a singular or inflexible response to academic integrity violations. Rather, we see these revisions as an opportunity for the university to formulate an institutional approach and for departments and programs to develop their own best practices that are equitable, consistent, and educationally and ethically meaningful.
In plain English - we will not force anyone to do anything, as long as it’s in line with what we define as “equitable, consistent and ethical” practices.
Since our Leaders are not known for their ability to express themselves in writing, we decided, as a courtesy to our readers, to translate the main guidelines to the new initiative:
Guiding Document.
Admin-Speak: Circulate a guiding document among UMB faculty that explains: current issues with academic integrity at UMB; a summary of what the restorative justice process to academic integrity entails; summaries or models of this approach at other universities.
Our translation: Produce a vague, jargon filled document that will make us look really smart even though we have no idea what we’re talking about, and scare all faculty into obedience.
Information gathering, preliminary draft proposal, campus conversation, revised draft proposal:
Admin-Speak: Gather input from the broad campus community about academic integrity and restorative justice; Develop a preliminary idea of the principles that should guide academic integrity at UMB and how the university might formulate its restorative justice approach to academic integrity based on feedback; identify any points in the approach that require revision; ask departments and programs to begin thinking about how this approach might operate in their specific disciplines; formulate a relatively finalized set of principles that will guide academic integrity at UMB and a revised draft based on feedback from campus conversations; work with departments and programs to develop general guidelines for addressing academic integrity specific to their individual needs to formulate broad consistency within programs and across the university.
Our translation: Create an online feedback form that will automatically direct all replies to trash; draft the proposal we had in mind from the start, vague jargon and all. “Encourage” all units to think of the desired approach. Hint at what might happen if anyone tried to enforce any kind of traditional disciplinary approach. Formulate a final draft while still completely ignoring feedback. Work with departments and programs and make sure they remain consistent with our approach, or else. Not that we know exactly what our approach is, but that’s beside the point.
Campus (re)Education:
Admin-Speak: Center this new approach in the UMB curriculum to foster a new culture around academic integrity, including: working with faculty and program directors for Gen Ed courses where academic integrity is centered in the curriculum; developing resources for faculty to use in classes.
Our translation: Use the opportunity to send out our tentacles into the curriculum despite the fact that the curriculum is determined by the departments and not by us, and work with faculty and program directors to enforce Gen Ed courses that promote our ideas of justice. Develop gulags to send dissidents who dare to question our approach to justice.
Since we are sure the guidelines will be as vague as it gets, we decided to volunteer our experience and pitch a concrete idea for restorative justice - using our identity based intersectionality hyper-matrix. You’re welcome, everyone.
As a reminder, the intersectionality hyper-matrix is a 5-dimensional matrix with the following axes:
Race (six values): “White”, “Asian American”, “Black or African American”, “Native American/Alaska Native”, and “Native Hawaiian/Pacific Islander”, “multiracial”. “Middle Eastern/North African” people are currently under “White” but will join soon
Ethnicity (two values): "Not Hispanic or Latino", “Hispanic or Latino"
Gender (11 values): “cis-gender man”, “cis-gender woman”, “transgender man”, “transgender woman”, “non-binary”, “two-spirit”, “bigender”, “agender”, “genderfluid”, “genderqueer”, “cat-gender” (other values may be added)
Sexual orientation (about eight values, the number is constantly growing, the list will remain a countable set nonetheless): “straight”, “gay”, “lesbian”, “bisexual”, “pansexual”, “asexual”, “queer”, “Narcissus”, …
Ability status (two values): “Not Disabled”, “Disabled”.
There are 2,112 cells in total, some may be empty. The order of the values is arbitrary, with the exception of the first one at every axis (or first and second on the race axis). The number of intersectional identities is the number of non-first values per individual.
Based on the student’s intersectionality score, academic dishonesty will be handled according to a sliding scale as follows:
zero-one intersectional identities: Full punitive measures, up to and including failure in the course or even suspension/expulsion from the university.
two-three intersectional identities: Restorative justice will be applied. The student will have to write an essay where s/he apologizes and pinky promises not to do it again. No other penalty will be imposed, regardless of the severity of the cheating or the number of cheating incidences.
Four intersectional identities and up: The student will enforce punitive measures on the professor who questioned his/her/zir different ways of (un)knowing and misinterpreted their alternative testing method as “cheating”. The sanctions on the professors are completely up to the student, and can be up to and including termination.
Remember the old saying -“You can fool some of the people all of the time, and all of the people some of the time, but you cannot fool all of the people all of the time.”? With the new restorative justice initiative this is no longer true - all people can cheat, all the time!