Beyond the immediate: Academic dishonesty

It was 1988 and I had been out of graduate school for two years when I encountered my first case of academic dishonesty (at least I had not suspected any dishonesty before that). The course was Experimental Psychology-a laboratory course like those at many universities where the centerpiece of the course is an independent experimental project of the student’s own design culminating in the submission of a complete write-up (in APA style, of course) of the experiment. (These days there are PowerPoint presentations in addition to the paper-and a relaxation of the APA style rules.) A student who had been performing at an average level in the class turned in a report of an experiment on some aspect of memory. (At least I think it was about memory-isn’t that what people studied in the 1980s?) The paper was excellent-and that was the problem. How could someone who can write so well, think so clearly, and present results so succinctly receive only a C on my tests, where the biggest challenge is to remember the distinction between a Type I and a Type II error? I knew that something was amiss when one of the dependent variables that he reported revealed a grain of analysis finer than what would be possible with the reported number of participants. He reported the percentage of participants who responded in a particular way, but when converted to a number, the value was not a whole number. In other words, the data had come from a study with a greater number of participants than what he had reported. Eventually I found the article on which his paper was “based.”