Reports of cheating are on the upswing at NIU, but only slightly more than one out of every 1,000 students were proven guilty during the fall semester.

Judicial Office Director Larry Bolles said 29 NIU students were proven guilty of academic misconduct last semester and about 40 other cases were reported, but not yet proven.

“I’m just seeing the tip of the iceberg,” Bolles said. About 24,300 students are enrolled at NIU, so only .1 percent of students were proven guilty of cheating last semester.

“Cheating in class is getting to be like cheating on your taxes,” Bolles said. “I’m disenchanted that students are cheating.”

Even more disenchanting is the fact that the number of cases usually increases during the spring semester. “Students are more inclined to cheat during the spring,” Bolles said. Many students end up on academic probation after the fall semester and cheat during the spring to try to raise their grades, he said.

Under the Academic Misconduct listing of the NIU Student Judicial Code, cheating is defined as, “Receipt or transmission of unauthorized aid on assignments or examinations, plagiarism, unauthorized use of examination materials or other forms of dishonesty in academic matters.”

“I’m not speaking of every student on this campus, but far too many exhibit a lack of ethics,” Bolles said. “I’m very disappointed in the ethics of students. We have an unethical climate and it’s getting thicker and thicker.”

Cheating is increasing steadily, according to a national survey of college freshmen conducted by the American Council on Education and Higher Education Research Institute.

Of those surveyed in 1988, 37 percent said they cheated on a high school exam, up 7 percent from 1987, while 57 percent surveyed admitted they copied homework, increasing 5 percent from 1987.

“Far too many students on this campus were using other people’s term papers,” Bolles said. Other forms of academic misconduct include not attributing facts in papers, copying computer programs, forging departmental signatures for readmission to NIU, stealing exams and “reckless eyeballing” during tests, he said.

But “ringers,” students who pose as others in large classes to take exams, are one of the most flagrant cheating offenses, Bolles said. Ringers usually charge $150 to fake exams, but they might charge up to $500 to forge math tests, he said.

Instructors are cracking down by checking student identification cards in lecture hall exams and having teaching assistants proctor the tests, Bolles said. Some instructors also assign seating charts and number exams to know if any are missing, he said.

Ringers “run the risk of getting put out of the university for a few lousy bucks,” Bolles said.

The majority of academic misconduct cases are from the computer science and math departments, Bolles said. “The average student I see is a computer science major,” he said, adding cheaters are often above-average students. Students with 3.7 grade point averages have been caught cheating because they expect staight A’s, he said.

Rodney Angotti, computer science department chairman, said cheating “seems to be one of our major problems.” He said computer science students might tend to cheat because of deadline stress and high competition within the field.

Angotti said his department finds about 15 to 20 cheating cases each semester, but the department is very large, handling one-fourth of the graduate students in NIU’s College of Liberal Arts and Sciences.

About 60 percent of grading in the computer science department is based on in-class tests, while 40 percent is based on programs prepared out of class, Angotti said. Some students take “short cuts” and receive a little too much help on programs, he said.

According to the Judicial Code, a student caught cheating is given the opportunity to resolve the matter with the course instructor and department chairman. If the student does not object, the toughest sanction is an ‘F’ in the course, unless it is a repeat or flagrant offense. A report is sent to the University Judicial Office and is on the student’s record.

If there is a dispute, the case goes before the Judicial Hearing Board and tougher sanctions, including expulsion from NIU for up to four years, may be assigned.

Stanley Trail, associate chair of the math department, said most cheating incidents occur in the general education math classes. “I would guess it occurs not in majors, but in service classes,” he said. These classes include Math 110, 210 and 155.

Trail said he is also disturbed by ringers. “The first incident I saw of this happened 20 years ago. It’s been somewhat more prevalent in the past five or six years,” he said.

Cheaters deserve “all the judicial wrath Larry Bolles can lay on them,” Trail said, adding the department usually asks for one or two semesters of expulsion.

Cheating “is not only anti-intellectual, it’s just not fair to the student body at large,” Trail said.

Many students caught cheating take the situation lightly, Bolles said. “I don’t think they’re remorseful,” he said. Students “are defining cheating, and once they define it, they can do whatever they want.”