The University of Minnesota announced that students with cheating violations on their records will be able to have them expunged if they sign up for an on-campus program on integrity.
The University of Minnesota announced in September that students with cheating violations on their records can sign up for an integrity workshop to have those offenses expunged from their record.
“The thought behind [the program] if a student engages in behavior that is in violation with our policy, we want them to be able to understand the impact of that,” Jessica Kuecker Grotjohn, the assistant director of the Office of Community Standards argued.
The program only requires offending students to attend a two-hour meeting with staff members, in which they will “discuss the impact of the scholastic dishonesty and then agree on an educational opportunity the student can participate in to demonstrate understanding of academic integrity.” After attending the meeting, administrators will expunge the academic dishonesty record from the student’s record.
Some academics argue that a path to erasure is the best approach for dealing with issues of academic dishonesty. Jason Stephens, a University of Auckland professor who researches academic cheating, argues that students who are caught cheating focus on their punishment rather than on why they made the decision to cheat. “A lot of times, if a student is caught cheating, the focus is on punishment … there ought to be a lot more educational approaches,” said Jason Stephens, “I believe all institutions should have some form of a ‘second chance type program’—that is to say, they should take a developmental approach to promoting academic integrity,” Stephens argued.
Stephens believes that programs like the one being introduced at the University of Minnesota are the best way to reduce cheating. “Academic dishonesty is a widespread problem at both secondary and tertiary levels of education,” Stephens continued. “It has been for decades and will remain so for many more to come unless schools and universities take more thoughtful, systemic action to create ‘cultures of integrity.’”
“We want [students] to learn and be accountable. We want them to walk away being a better person,” Kuecker Grotjohn added.