UNMC dental faculty: Cheating goes unpunished

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BY MELISSA LEE / Lincoln Journal Star

Allegations of widespread cheating at NU’s College of Dentistry have ushered in stricter policies on student conduct, pitted faculty against their dean and triggered a state investigation.

On Thursday, State Auditor Mike Foley said he’s looking into revelations that dental students have been selling test questions and other course materials to pay for an annual collegewide party called the Pig Roast.

Foley said he’s met with John Reinhardt, dean of the University of Nebraska Medical Center College of Dentistry, and that Reinhardt provided materials students have packaged and sold to each other as a study aid for years.

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The materials — some packaged in a 1,200-page notebook, some collected on a CD — contain test questions, lecture notes, charts, tables and other materials from a variety of dental courses.

First-year dental students could buy the notebook for $150 from their older peers. About 90 percent of them were doing so.

Said Foley: “I am concerned about the possible sale of university intellectual property and the whereabouts of the money that was generated from these transactions.”

He wouldn’t speculate on the potential consequences of his investigation.

But long before Foley began his probe, some dental faculty members were fuming over the way Reinhardt responded to the discovery of the so-called study file.

Among their complaints:

* Unlike at other dental schools where recent cheating scandals have surfaced, no NU student faces failure or expulsion for assembling, buying or selling the notebook or the related CD.

On the CD, seven students from the class of 2009 are listed as the authors of various documents, although their exact roles in producing and distributing the CD is unknown.

At issue: Some of the test questions in the study file and on the CD were not released by the faculty who wrote them, the dean acknowledged. That means that for some courses, faculty fear, students may have had questions in hand before they took the tests.

Official College of Dentistry guidelines warn in bold print that cheating and academic misconduct are automatic grounds for failure.

* After he was alerted to the file’s existence last spring by a concerned student, Reinhardt said, he decided to put nearly all the file’s material — which dates back as far as 15 years — online so all students would have equal access to its contents.

Reinhardt said faculty approved the posting of the material via their department chairs. But some faculty say they did no such thing and that the decision forces them to undertake the time-consuming task of rewriting exams.

* According to Reinhardt, the students who elected to buy the file paid $150 each, with much of the profits going toward the Pig Roast, an annual social event for dental college students and faculty and their families.

The dental school has about 45 students in each of its four classes, for a total of about 180. With 90 percent of each class buying the file, Reinhardt figured the roast fund was netting $6,000 or more per year.

Some faculty members say they are angry students profited off their property.

And they’re disappointed in what they say is a lax response by their administration.

“There’s no question there’s been the intentional passing along of materials. Notes are one thing, exams are another,” said one faculty member.

Said another: “I’m appalled. I’m ashamed. I’m hurt. This is about ethics.”

Five dental faculty and two students were interviewed for this story, and numerous documents, including minutes from faculty meetings and memos from Reinhardt, were reviewed. Nearly two dozen other faculty and students were contacted but refused to be interviewed.

But in confirming each other’s accounts, the faculty who did speak agreed to do so only on condition of anonymity, fearing they could endanger their salaries, job status or standing at work.

They spoke, they said, because they believe academic justice has not been served.

Asked to describe the students’ actions, Reinhardt said: “In my mind, it’s bad judgment. That’s how I describe this. Bad judgment means using things that appear to be appropriate, but you’re not positive.”

The dean said he believes he handled the issue promptly and fairly, and that students now understand the gravity of possessing course materials faculty haven’t approved for release.

“Do I wish this had never happened?” he asked. “Obviously, but I think we’ve broken something here that needed to be broken.”

The file surfaces

Reinhardt said he and many faculty learned of the file last spring after a student alerted trusted faculty members.

Why, the student wanted to know, didn’t faculty know about the file? And were the file’s contents approved for student use?

Reinhardt’s response, he said, was to call in each of the four class presidents for questioning.

He said he asked for a copy of the file. A class president produced one, and Reinhardt went to an ATM, withdrew $150 from his personal account and bought it.

“I just wanted it so quickly,” he said. “We wanted to get right to the bottom of this.”

College professors often release old exams to be used as study tools, and the file did contain many such exams and quizzes. But Reinhardt and faculty were surprised to find unreleased exam materials in the file, too.

“And the fact that money was involved was a unique factor,” said one professor. “... It had become something that most people felt was perfectly acceptable behavior, and that was disappointing. This was not something that was sanctioned by the faculty.”

Two students say because the unreleased materials were not identified in any way, they didn’t know parts of the file would not meet faculty approval.

Further, they say, they have no idea how the unreleased materials ended up in the file.

“It’s a helpful study aid,” said one of those students, Cody Christline, president of the class of 2009. “It works well for students, especially in their freshman year.”

Class officers managed profits from the file in a bank account independent of the university, Christline said. Money that didn’t go to the Pig Roast was set aside as “emergency funds” to be used as officers saw fit.

For example, they recently bought flowers and a card for a fellow student whose wife died, Christline said.

He said he had no ethical concerns when he bought the file as a first-year student. But after learning faculty had not approved it, he said, he and his classmates are vowing to be more professional.

“We may have fallen short of that highest standard,” he said. “That’s something that everybody around here is shooting for. ... This is something that needed to be addressed, and it has been.”

Said another student who, fearing reprisal, declined to be identified: “Even before we came to school, a lot of people had heard about (the file). Everyone seemed on board with it and so you just got it. Whether people ended up using it a lot, who knows?”

Using the file wasn’t cheating, that student said, because students didn’t know some materials hadn’t been released.

But asked whether questions from the file had ever shown up during a real exam, the student paused, then said: “I don’t feel comfortable answering that.”

‘Stern discussions’

Since the fall semester began, Reinhardt said, he has been working with class presidents to spread the message that circulating faculty members’ intellectual property is wrong.

Further, the seven students whose names appear on the CD were called into Reinhardt’s office for what he called “stern discussions.” They’ve been asked to tell him, in writing, what they’ve learned from the experience.

And starting this year, each incoming class will receive a strict lesson on ethics, he said.

Reinhardt believes that level of discipline is appropriate, given that the vast majority of students purchased the file and that figuring out whether any current students gathered unreleased course materials would be difficult.

He conceded putting the unreleased materials from the file online wasn’t ideal.

“What else could we do? You can’t go back 15 years and change all this,” he said.

In the future, students caught using unreleased materials will face severe punishment, up to expulsion, Reinhardt said.

“There’s a lot of gray area here — who was involved, how long it’s been going on. Based on what we know, we’re acting appropriately. We’ve laid down the law pretty clearly.

“It’s a learning experience for the students. It’s very clear to them that this was bad judgment.”

Reinhardt has the public support of the UNMC administration and, he believes, a majority of the dental college’s 110 faculty.

Rubens Pamies, UNMC vice chancellor for academic affairs, backed that up.

The college can’t act rashly, Pamies said, or incriminate innocent students.

UNMC dental students typically score well on national board exams and perform community service across the state, for which they should be commended, Pamies said.

“These are solid students. They may have purchased some things without knowing the full implications that they thought would help them do better in their classes,” he said. “We can’t assume everyone’s guilty without knowing the full information.”

Pamies blamed “miscommunication” for students’ use of unapproved exam materials.

Asked how miscommunication could lead to the acquisition of unreleased materials, Pamies said: “That’s a good question. I wish I could find out.”

Sufficient discipline?

Some faculty are calling for a deeper investigation into whether any current students were involved in gathering faculty members’ unreleased materials.

And if they were, some faculty say, UNMC should impose tough sanctions like those at other dental schools.

In 2006 at the University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey, one student was denied a diploma and nearly a quarter of the graduating class was forced to perform community service after students were caught accepting credit for clinical procedures they didn’t perform.

The next year, a group of students at the same school faced discipline after they were caught memorizing test questions and compiling them on a CD for future students to study.

In June 2007, Southern Illinois University suspended the grades of all 52 first-year dental students while it investigated possible academic misconduct. And nearly 50  students at Indiana University’s dental school were dismissed, suspended or reprimanded for breaking into password-protected computer files.

Meanwhile, at UNMC, Reinhardt is encouraging faculty to re-write their exams as often as possible to reduce the possibility of misconduct.

Faculty members say that’s more difficult than it appears.

Further, some worry that without strict discipline, misconduct will resurface.

Said one professor: “What’s wrong with good old-fashioned studying?”

Reach Melissa Lee at 473-2682 or mlee@journalstar.com.