Department heads recently discussed LITRE, and given the number of us who remarked on the growing use of technology to cheat, Margo Daub of Botany suggested that we might want to rename the program CITRE (cheater), Cheating in a Technology Rich Environment.

The problem has reached such proportions that The Wall Street Journal has recently twice taken note of the use of technology for cheating: once in a front page story and then in a major story in the weekly technology section.

For Department heads, one of the critical questions is the return on investment

• although LITRE and Stan North-Martin's classroom improvement project provide funds, departments often invest on their own for wireless, and other learning technology equipment
• while it's relatively easy to work up a budget for purchasing the equipment, we don't have ready ways to estimate the unintended costs of this equipment in terms of policing it to make sure that it's being use properly and not for cheating and of working with faculty to "prosecute" the misuses of the equipment.

Questions on enforcement:
Using a particular phrase to searching through google and databases in the library makes it easier to find plagiarism than than trying to guess the student's source and then locating it.
NCSU students who do cut and past from the web also are helpful by being too lazy to go beyond the initial cite on the web, which is the one they usually use
On the other hand not all faculty are either aware of the technological means at students disposal, or if they are, not particularly sophisticated about how it might be deployed or blocked
Finally, and perhaps most important is the faculty are sometimes resistant to establishing a "one size fits all" policy for dealing with problems of academic integrity particular with plagiarism. Do we report cases where a single sentence has been copied, or only gross plagiarism, etc?

We need to be proactive. I spent part of last summer creating a set of materials for our Department web page that seeks to instruct students as to what the history profession's standards for academic integrity are, what the university's standards are. We need to teach students very concretely what plagiarism is and how to recognize it, so I provided links to an interactive quiz at Indiana University that walks the user through a series of scenarios to help users understand these issues. I've also reminded faculty that they need to make their policies on collaborative work and on sharing of work very clear because every discipline is not the same. The key may be that students should be encouraged to mentor each other through collaboration, but not to share work

• these steps can't work on their own.
• NCSU has to make clear from day one through speeches by Chancellor and Provost what the Univesity s standards and penalties are. Academic integrity needs to become inextricably woven into the fabric of life here.
• departments need to hammer the same message home from the first orientation, through every class that they give note, though, that in reviewing teaching evaluations, I ve noticed that when a faculty member has discovered a case of cheating or plagiarism and uses it as a vehicle to remind the entire class about the importance of academic integrity, many students resent the implication that they, too, are prone to cheating or plagiarism. Speak to the offender, they say.