PressEthic

Coluumbia Journalism School is abuzz!

Cheating is not unheard of on university campuses. But cheating on an open-book, take-home exam in a pass-fail course seems odd, and all the more so in a course about ethics.

Yet Columbia’s Graduate School of Journalism is looking into whether students may have cheated on the final exam in just such a course, “Critical Issues in Journalism.” According to the school’s Web site, the course “explores the social role of journalism and the journalist from legal, historical, ethical, and economic perspectives,” with a focus on ethics.

Among a dozen or so marginally inebriated Columbia students I spoke to last night over Coors Light and guitar music, the consensus rumor is that a student told another student, "Come out drinking with us tonight! You don't have to stay in and study for the ethics exam. I'll tell you the questions."

But no one is certain what happened -- only that the whole roughly 300 person class has been called for a special Friday session, a fact that grates on the nerves of nearly everyone I've spoken to because they hate the class, its professor Sam Friedman, and the idea of collective punishment for a cheating student's deeds.

Students expect they'll be assigned an additional 500 word essay on this matter, and some are advocating open rebellion. One student suggested convincing the whole class to write "I will not cheat" over and over again until they reach 500 words as a gesture to underscore a belief that the ethics class -- in which, among other things, students weren't alowwed to use the restroom -- treats them like juveniles.

But this observer is confident that too many Columbia students are too concerned about jeopardizing their degree and career to rebel openly.

UPDATE: Yes, I understand the irony of the cheating on an ethics exam story line, but isn't this garnering excessive press coverage given that there are uncertain and anonymous allegations of an undetermined number of students cheating? There's no excuse for having done so, of course, and a severe punishment would seem to me justified for any student caught.

On the other hand, any school that cycles 300 students through its program every year, meanwhile giving take-home tests where students aren't supposed to talk to one another, are pretty surely going to encounter the occassional cheater.

I can't help but think that there are 100 more newsworthy things going on at Columbia this week than the fact that someone in the journalism school might've cheated on a test.

Right now people in England -- and Ohio -- are reading the only story they're likely to see about Columbia Journalism School this year.

As someone who has interacted with a great many Columbia students this year, I've been sufficiently impressed by their prevailing ethical sense that I can't help but feel the effect of this coverage is to give readers a misleading portrait of the institution.