New program turns minor cheating violations into a learning opportunity

An initiative to handle minor, first-time academic integrity violations in classes is rolling out to the entire university in the fall semester after a successful two-and-a-half-year pilot.

The Accepting Responsibility program gives faculty and students an alternative to a primary hearing – a complex, sometimes adversarial process for adjudicating serious academic violations – when a student has cheated on part of an assignment or used AI to answer a question in a way that violates class policy, for instance.

The program also teaches students how to better deal with the academic challenges that lead them to violate integrity rules in the first place.

“Primary hearings take a substantial amount of time. There is preparation of the evidence, scheduling, conduct of the hearing and notification of the decision. This can be disruptive to the educational process,” said Liz Karns, director of academic integrity initiatives in the Office of Vice Provost for Undergraduate Education. “It’s often quite fraught in terms of people’s anxiety all around.”

The pilot program started in Spring 2024 with a handful of courses in the Cornell Ann S. Bowers College of Computing and Information Science, scaling up to support more courses and colleges through subsequent semesters.

Approximately 360 students from 100 courses have participated in the program. Of those, four students have had a second violation.

Accepting Responsibility will be available to all in-person courses on the Ithaca campus and at Cornell Tech. The Faculty Senate updated the Code of Academic Integrity to include the program, effective Aug. 24. Major violations, like plagiarizing a paper or cheating on a final exam, will still result in a primary hearing.

After a faculty member flags a minor violation, the student can choose to either undergo a primary hearing or participate in the Accepting Responsibility program. That entails taking a workshop focused on values and habits, and accepting a reduced penalty on the assignment.

More than half of the violations during the pilot phase were AI-related, according to Karns, who developed the program along with Michael Clarkson, Ph.D. ’10, teaching professor in Cornell Bowers, and Lawrence Blume, the Kenneth O. Reed Professor of Economics in the College of Arts & Sciences and associate dean for academic affairs in Cornell Bowers.

Most students in the program report that they ran out of time on the assignment and made an impulsive choice, said program facilitator Z.K. Payne, a doctoral candidate in the field of philosophy. Sometimes the students didn’t understand the rules because they didn’t read the syllabus.

“I’ve really gotten to see students process what’s happened and come up with very tangible strategies for the future, so that they can make a better choice next time around,” she said.

The workshop facilitators lead the students in a discussion of how to develop skills with generative AI that don’t undermine learning, she said. “The opportunity to use an LLM is really just one click away,” Payne said. “In some ways, the students have to think about academic integrity on a more regular basis than they used to.”

The workshop gets students thinking about who they want to be and what they value, according to facilitator Urna Chakrabarty, a doctoral candidate in the field of philosophy. It is not punitive, and it does not cast students as villains because of one poor decision.

Students often start the workshop nervous and defensive but open up during the discussion, Payne said.

“It gives them some language to process the event, to relate to it better and to speak to the instructor and repair the breach of trust,” she said.

For faculty, the program often lessens the administrative burden, said Matt Eichhorn, assistant teaching professor in Cornell Bowers, who used the program in its pilot phase. “I can just have a conversation with the student when I suspect that there may be a violation, giving them kind of a comfortable way to own up to it.”

Accepting Responsibility makes it easier for instructors and students to focus on learning, Eichhorn said.

“My role is to educate people and to make them better and not really to have some sort of punitive role over them,” he said. “It feels much more comfortable to me to have a student go into this as a learning opportunity.”