McGill engineering professor Jeremy Cooperstock is blowing the whistle on plagiarism at McGill. Frustrated by what he perceives to be inconsistent rules on cheating, Cooperstock has launched the website D-grading McGill (www.degradingmcgill.ca). The site chronicles his dealings with the administration after reporting a case of cheating in his Winter 2007 Artificial Intelligence class to faculty superiors.
The website details Cooperstock's claims that two students copied program code on successive assignments. Both assignments required students to work independently.
"To me it was a clear-cut case of plagiarism," Cooperstock said. "On two out of the three individual assignments for the course, these students submitted work that they had clearly collaborated on."
According to Cooperstock, the first case of plagiarism went unnoticed by teaching assistants, but was discovered after a TA observed a blatant instance of collaboration on the second assignment. The professor claims that work submitted by the rest of the class was completely different.
"Furthermore, [my TAs and I] noticed that one of the plagiarized assignments had been tweaked a little bit to look different, and in doing so the student had broken the code," he said. "So when you tried to run the program it would fail to execute properly.
Nevertheless this student provided graph outputs and tables as if the program would run properly. So we have a case of plagiarism compounded by scientific misconduct."
Cooperstock was asked by an Associate Dean of Engineering to treat the work as honest, yet one of the students accused of plagiarism subsequently failed the course despite this. After the student wrote an email to Cooperstock threatening to sue the school, faculty administrators raised the student's grade from a 43 per cent to a D. This was made possible by re-grading the final examination, raising the student's mark on the plagiarised assignment, and removing a penalty for late submission on one of the course assignments.
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