“Dartmouth College has charged 64 students, many of them varsity athletes, with honor code violations following allegations of widespread cheating in a sports ethics class,” according to a Jan. 8 article in the Valley News.
The newspaper reports that the students face disciplinary actions, and that campus officials have declined to comment until an appeals process is completed sometime next week.
The Valley News‘ main source is Department of Religion Chairman Randall Balmer – a regular contributor to its perspectives section – who told the newspaper many students have been suspended. As for what happened, the class reportedly uses a tech called “clickers” to engage students during class – and apparently to check for attendance – and students were pretending to be their absent peers:
… in late October, students who failed to attend class passed off handheld devices known as “clickers” to classmates. Those students then used the gadgets to answer questions on the absent students’ behalf to make it appear as though they were present in class, Balmer said.
Though Balmer said that 43 students — less than the total number of students facing sanctions — handed off their clickers to their peers, some others confessed to him that they had helped their friends cheat.
The course in question was originally intended to help student-athletes, who sometimes had trouble with the coursework at Dartmouth, Balmer said. After a popular first run last year, the fall term’s class swelled to more than 280 students, and attendance and cheating became a problem. …
Balmer said in an email Wednesday night that “after many sleepless nights,” he had decided to drop the marks of the accused students by a full letter grade, rather than fail them.
h/t: Chronicle of Higher Education
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