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So do you feel pretty confident about copyright and fair use? Watch this "teachable moment" to see if you find any surprises.

Well-known teacher and blogger Bill Ferriter shared the embarrassing story of how he himself had learned a painful lesson about copyright on the Web. Digital technology is evolving so rapidly that it's difficult for copyright laws to keep up and for us to understand and keep current with the latest thinking. If we believe that creativity is basically combinatorial, then making decisions about what's fair to combine - to copy and remix - can be tricky. Law professor and copyright scholar Larry Lessig presents a brilliant argument the "remix culture" in this presentation.

This is a form of recreating - of using digital technology to say things differently - Larry Lessig

". . . to say things differently" is another way of saying transformational. Section 107 of the Copyright Law of the United States presents the four factors to use in deciding what Judge Leval later coined as "transformativeness."

In determining whether the use made of a work in any particular case is a fair use the factors to be considered shall include:
(1) the purpose and character of the use, including whether such use is of a commercial nature or is for nonprofit educational purposes;
(2) the nature of the copyrighted work;
(3) the amount and substantiality of the portion used in relation to the copyrighted work as a whole; and
(4) the effect of the use upon the potential market for or value of the copyrighted work.

It is a terribly slippery concept but Brandon Butler shares real insight here with this definition of transformativeness stratight from Judge Leval:

I believe the answer to the question of justification turns primarily on whether, and to what extent, the challenged use is transformative. The use must be productive and must employ the quoted matter in a different manner or for a different purpose from the original. [FN29] A quotation of copyrighted material that merely repackages or republishes the original is unlikely to pass the test; in Justice Story's words, it would merely "supersede the objects" of the original. [FN30] If, on the other hand, the secondary use adds value to the original-if the quoted matter is used as raw material, transformed in the creation of new information, new aesthetics, new insights and understandings- this is the very type of activity that the fair use doctrine intends to protect for the enrichment of society. [FN31] - Butler on Digital-Copyright Forum

A simple mantra for determining transformative use in this class will be:
1. Is it a new context?
2. Is there a new meaning, a new message?
3. Does this creation offer any competition to the original or can it be substituted for the original?

We'll use the Code of Best Practices in Fair Use for Media Literacy Education as our "bible" in making decisions about copyright and fair use. This resource has been developed by experts representing over 150 professional organizations and vetted by a team of legal scholars and experts. Of particular import is Principle 4:

FOUR:STUDENT USE OF COPYRIGHTED MATERIALS IN THEIR OWN ACADEMIC AND CREATIVE WORK

DESCRIPTION: Students strengthen media literacy skills by creating messages and using such symbolic forms as language, images, sound, music, and digital media to express and share meaning. In learning to use video editing software and in creating remix videos, students learn how juxtaposition reshapes meaning. Students include excerpts from copyrighted material in their own creative work for many purposes, including for comment and criticism, for illustration, to stimulate public discussion, or in incidental or accidental ways (for example, when they make a video capturing a scene from everyday life where copyrighted music is playing). - Code of Best Practices in Media Literacy for Education

A critical pedagogical concern in teaching about transformativeness is that students understand that they remix to create a new message, to "say something differently," and not to save themselves work. The Code of Best Practices explains this well:

LIMITATIONS: Students' use of copyrighted material should not be a substitute for creative effort. Students should be able to understand and demonstrate, in a manner appropriate to their developmental level, how their use of a copyrighted work repurposes or transforms the original. For example, students may use copyrighted music for a variety of purposes, but cannot rely on fair use when their goal is simply to establish a mood or convey an emotional tone, or when they employ popular songs simply to exploit their appeal and popularity. Again, material that is incorporated under fair use should be properly attributed wherever possible. Students should be encouraged to make their own careful assessments of fair use and should be reminded that attribution, in itself, does not convert an infringing use into a fair one - Code of Best Practices in Media Literacy for Education

For more on the Power and Responsibility of Using Intellectual Property, including Patrick McKay's video rebuttal of YouTube's "Copyright School" video . . .
And for additional copyright and fair use information for teaching - Copyright Remix . . .

Finally, Larry Lessig gives a micro-second plug for Creative Commons in his TED presentation and encourages that . . .

artists and creators embrace the idea, choose that their work be accessible freely.

As artists and creators in this class, I'd encourage you to learn about Creative Commons and consider carefully and generously as you choose licenses for your own work. Here's a video that explains the different Creative Commons licenses simply with clear examples and lauds the benefits of sharing freely.

For more on Creative Commons, see David Hopkins's thoughtful post which also includes a very handy infographic you won't want to miss. And, as you consider Creative Commons licensing, it may be helpful to read teacher Karen Fasimpaur's story of her own experience in licensing her work and how her thinking has evolved.

For sources of Creative Commons or other free-to-use materials, see Guide to Royalty-Free Materials and Free Tools . . .

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Copyright, Fair Use, and Creative Commons

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So do you feel pretty confident about copyright and fair use? Watch this "teachable moment" to see if you find any surprises. Well-known teacher and blogger Bill Ferriter shared the embarrassing story of how he himself had learned a painful lesson about copyright on the Web.

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As we studied this topic in an online course I'm taking, I realized how little I understood it, and figured I wasn't alone in that regard.

After studying this topic in the " Implementing Instructional Technology Innovations" course I am taking online at UW-Stout with instructor Ann Bell, I wanted to understand it even better, since I struggled with it in the fast paced course as we covered it. I have to imagine that I am not alone in my confusion over how I can or can't use copyrighted materials, especially in education, where there are some special allowances.

I assume that when instructors want to know what they can or cannot do with copyrighted materials, they may often have a hard time figuring it out. I really wanted to understand the topic and provide resources to help others do the same. Similarly, understanding how to leverage Creative Commons licensing was also not terribly straightforward, and I wanted to understand that better too. So I started reading further and learning more.
Using Copyrighted Materials - "Fair Use"
To better understand the topic of Copyright and Fair Use, and the special provisions that have been made for educational uses, I combed through a lot of materials that our professor had provided. It was a bit too much to digest all of this content originally, in the rush of getting through the week's assignments, but at the close of the week, the instructor fortuitously reminded me of one particularly excellent resource.

The resource that really helped to clarify is this excellent 2 page poster-format document explains Copyright Fair Use in education [Editor's Note - I just learned that this link is no longer functional - I will try find this document again and provide an updated link - KW 4/24/11]. Thanks to Technology & Learning for this wonderful resource that summarizes what educators can do with different types of materials and stay within the guidelines of what is acceptable as "Fair Use" of copyrighted materials.

To learn more, you might also want to check out this "What is Fair Use?" article.
Creative Commons
Creative Commons is an extension of Copyright. Creative Commons licenses give you the ability to dictate how others may exercise your copyright rights, allowing them to copy your work, make derivative works, distribute it, and so on. Creative Commons strikes me as a wonderful idea, really helping to expand on copyright and encourage others to use materials in ways the creators are comfortable with.

There are 6 different types of Creative Commons license types, and they each have their own special icons to indicate that they apply to a given work, but I rarely seem to see them displayed on works, even when they are clearly supposed to be Creative Commons licensed works (as in Flickr's "Commons" section). To see the symbols associated with each licensing type, click through to this page that explains CC licensing types (following is my attempt at an even further condensed explanation of these):

Attribution: This is the least restrictive license. You can distribute, remix, change, and build upon the work, even commercially, as long as you credit the original creation.

Attribution Share Alike: You can change and build upon the work, even for commercial reasons, as long as you credit the creator and license your new creation under the identical terms.

Attribution No Derivatives: Allows for redistribution, commercial and non-commercial, as long as it is passed along unchanged and in whole, with credit to the creator.

Attribution Non-Commercial: Lets others remix, change, and build upon the work only non-commercially, and new works must acknowledge the original, but they don't have to license those derivative works on the same terms.

Attribution Non-Commercial Share Alike: Others can remix, tweak, and build upon a work non-commercially, as long as they credit the creator and license their new creations under the identical terms. All new work based will carry the same license (derivatives will also be non-commercial in nature).

Attribution Non-Commercial No Derivatives: The most restrictive license. Often called the "free advertising" license because it allows others to download works and share them with others as long as they mention the source and link back to it, but they can't change the work in any way, or use them commercially.

Understanding these license variations can be a little tough, but I think the bigger challenge with Creative Commons is the lack of consistency with which this licensing is conveyed for works found online, and the slow adoption of this concept in general.

Before closing, I want to mention that one cool site I came across while learning about CC is the Creative Commons Mixter. where you can download, sample, and share music licensed under Creative Commons.

I hope this helps to summarize these licenses concepts, and provides a set of resources that can help you understand what you can and cannot do under these licensing guidelines.

Related Posts (if the above topic is of interest, you might want to check these out):
Video blog entry "Copyright and Fair Use, as applied to Education & Teaching"
30 Posts About Free Education Technology Tools & Resources
5 Reasons Why Educators Need To Embrace Internet Technologies

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Understanding Copyright, Fair Use, and Creative Commons, as they apply to Education

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After studying this topic in the " Implementing Instructional Technology Innovations" course I am taking online at UW-Stout with instructor Ann Bell, I wanted to understand it even better, since I struggled with it in the fast paced course as we covered it.

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Copyright, Fair Use and Creative Commons

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This lesson was created to introduce learners to Copyright law, the Fair Use Doctrine, and the Creative Commons.

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There are no shortages of articles, resources, videos, and ideas found online to support our educational planning. With the vast amount of ways to create and disseminate learning materials, it is critical to appropriately share, curate, remix, and adapt educational content. In open education, it is important to understand how to attribute and identify copyright, fair use, and intellectual property.
Flickr image c/o Langwitches
In gathering resources for my courses and to encourage appropriate attribution as my students to create, this is a quick overview and definitions of copyright, fair use, the public domain, and the creative commons.

[Video; 6:19 minutes]This is an introductory video in copyright law, specifically about how to share copyrighted material at work while still respecting the rights of the content creators. Will you require permission before using materials? Do you ask permission before using protected content?

This is an introductory video in copyright law, specifically about how to share copyrighted material at work while still respecting the rights of the content creators. Will you require permission before using materials? Do you ask permission before using protected content?

Copyright law applies to all works, including print, media, and electronic mediums

Protected: Books, magazines, online articles, songs, screens plays, choreography, art, software, work, software, podcasts, and photos

Not Protected: Ideas, facts & data; government items

Know the facts about copyright, not the myths

Get permission if required (when in doubt get permission)

Just because you found it online, & it is publically available does not mean it is free to use

Not sure? Just ASK! Legal counsel at your workplace or an information professional (in the College of Information) or at the UNT Library for advice.

UNT Copyright Resources https://copyright.unt.edu/

CLEAR Copyright Guide for Instructors http://clear.unt.edu/copyright

Electronic Frontier Foundation: Teaching Copyright Resources

Flickr image c/o Horia Valarn
Fair Use from copyright.gov:
"Fair Use is a legal doctrine that promotes freedom of expression by permitting the unlicensed use of copyright-protected works in certain circumstances. Section 107 of the Copyright Act provides the statutory framework for determining whether something is a fair use and identifies certain types of uses-such as criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching, scholarship, and research-as examples of activities that may qualify as fair use."
Specifically, there are four requirements for fair use of materials:

1. The purpose is for nonprofit, noncommercial educational use (typical cases).

2. The nature of the copyrighted work is consistent with the proposed use.

3. The amount and substantiality of the original work involved some small uses can be considered an infringement, that is, a small portion involves the core idea in the copyrighted work.

4. The effect of using the copyrighted work is not likely to deprive the copyright holder of sales or market interest.

The "public domain" relates to creative materials or works that are not protected by intellectual property laws, including copyright, trademark, or patent laws. These materials are owned by the public, not an individual author, artist, or creator. Public domain materials and work may be used without obtaining any permission; however, no one is permitted to claim ownership for it. More information about the Public Domain, "Collective Works," and when copyright expires can be found at the Copyright & Fair Use Website via Stanford University and Teaching Copyright via the EFF.

Wanna Work Together? from Creative Commons on Vimeo. Creative Commons copyright licenses and tools allow for content to be shared beyond the traditional "all rights reserved" setting and decide on the best form of attribution for their work. The goal is to refine how copyright works and allows content creators to CHOOSE if they want to retain copyright while letting others copy, distribute, and make use of part of their work. You can decide what the copyright is and how others may use your photo, music, or works. Creative Commons licenses provide:

" everyone from individual creators to large companies and institutions a simple, standardized way to grant copyright permissions to their creative work. The combination of our tools and our users is a vast and growing digital commons, a pool of content that can be copied, distributed, edited, remixed, and built upon, all within the boundaries of copyright law."

To enhance your learning, training, and/or presentation materials, you may want to find creative commons and public domain images, videos, music, or media. Certain websites, such as Flickr Creative Commons, even offer users content with specific attribution for use. There is even a Creative Commons Search to aggregate even more content to share, use and remix, including media, images, video, audio, music, photography, and web resources. Besides Flickr, there are a number of other helpful sites to locate Public Domain or Creative Commons images. Additionally, there are ways to attribute and provide CC by licenses via other online accounts including YouTube, Bandcamp, SoundCloud, Vimeo, Archive.org, and your blog or website.

Want to learn more about Creative Commons and Open Educational Resources (OERs)? Check out UNT CLEAR's Creative Commons Guide and the UBC's OER Accessibility Toolkit.

Learning & Development, PhD.Lecturer at @UNTCOI & Researcher at @RoyalRoads. digital life & networked communities, #AcDigID, library, mentoring, #socialmedia, @Networked_CoP+ Podcaster: @BreakDrink & @3Wedu View all posts by Laura Pasquini

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Getting Started with Copyright, Fair Use, The Public Domain, and Creative Commons

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There are no shortages of articles, resources, videos, and ideas found online to support our educational planning. With the vast amount of ways to create and disseminate learning materials, it is critical to appropriately share, curate, remix, and adapt educational content. In open education, it is important to understand how to attribute and identify copyright, fair...

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Here's the latest excerpt from our Techdirt Book Club selection for May, Reclaiming Fair Use by Patricia Aufderheide and Peter Jaszi. We're running a bit late with these, and will have one more excerpt next week. If you want to see the first excerpt and the second excerpt, go check them out.

Also, Patricia will be joining us for a live Q&A discussion session about the book on Friday, June 8th at 1pm PT/4pm ET. If you have some initial questions, you can post them below or on theStep 2 discussion page, and we'll try to incorporate them into the Q&A.

This particular excerpt discusses the differences between fair use, the public domain and Creative Commons

People who are well aware of how copyright ownership weighs on new creators often confuse fair use with efforts to recover and recreate the public domain, or material not (or no longer) bound by copyright ownership. Sometimes they even think these efforts are in competition. In fact, they are complementary ways to address the same general problem, as David Bollier has noted. Furthermore, enthusiasm for public domain work sometimes leads people to believe that fair use is not as useful as it is. This is because they have been drawn to public domain work by their frustration with copyright ownership restrictions, and have associated all of copyright with copyright ownership. They have not yet become aware of the flexibility and power of the fair use doctrine, and they see one side of copyright as the only side. Sometimes they simply do not have faith that copyright imbalance can be righted.

Creative Commons (CC) is possibly the best-publicized of the efforts to create an artificial public domain to compensate for the badly eroded zone of copyright-free work. It was launched by legal scholar Lawrence Lessig, who indeed was dismissive, even contemptuous, of the potential of fair use to address copyright imbalance. However, CC was not an attempt to supplant or be better than fair use. Rather it was an attempt to solve a different problem: how to allow people to give away or condition their long and strong copyright. CC licenses use the strength of owners' rights to allow owners the leeway to release their works into an artificial public domain.

So CC creates a zone inside copyright ownership for owners who want to be generous and give their works away. All CC licenses impose some conditions, and some impose more than others. (Some people ignore this; owners of CC licenses sometimes complain that people do not honor the conditions.) This makes CC a copyright-light zone rather than copyright-free zone, and of course it does nothing (and doesn't pretend to) to loosen long and strong copyright policy-rather, it depends upon it.

A CC license, intended to promote circulation of work, may limit it to the alternative CC world it was born into. This is precisely because it is designed to be an alternative to rather than a feature of the copyrighted environment. Many CC licenses forbid the use of digital rights management (DRM), which is standard to all commercial DVD contracts. Thus, a CC license may kill a distribution deal. Even people who depend upon CC licenses, such as the makers of open educational resources-scholarly materials of all kinds, available free on the web-still sometimes need fair use. That is because most new work refers to existing culture. When that happens, people need to exercise their right of fair use, because most work is not in the copyright-light, fenced-in zone.

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Fair Use, Public Domain And Creative Commons: They're Not All The Same

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Here's the latest excerpt from our Techdirt Book Club selection for May, Reclaiming Fair Use by Patricia Aufderheide and Peter Jaszi. We're running a bit late with these, and will have one more excerpt next week. If you want to see the...

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1.  U.S. Department of Education (FERPA)

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1.  U.S. Department of Education (FERPA)

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The Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA) (20 U.S.C. § 1232g; 34 CFR Part 99) is a Federal law that protects the privacy of student education records. The law applies to all schools that receive funds under an applicable program of the U.S. Department of Education.

FERPA gives parents certain rights with respect to their children's education records. These rights transfer to the student when he or she reaches the age of 18 or attends a school beyond the high school level. Students to whom the rights have transferred are "eligible students."

Parents or eligible students have the right to inspect and review the student's education records maintained by the school. Schools are not required to provide copies of records unless, for reasons such as great distance, it is impossible for parents or eligible students to review the records. Schools may charge a fee for copies.

Parents or eligible students have the right to request that a school correct records which they believe to be inaccurate or misleading. If the school decides not to amend the record, the parent or eligible student then has the right to a formal hearing. After the hearing, if the school still decides not to amend the record, the parent or eligible student has the right to place a statement with the record setting forth his or her view about the contested information.

Generally, schools must have written permission from the parent or eligible student in order to release any information from a student's education record. However, FERPA allows schools to disclose those records, without consent, to the following parties or under the following conditions (34 CFR § 99.31):

School officials with legitimate educational interest;

Other schools to which a student is transferring;

Specified officials for audit or evaluation purposes;

Appropriate parties in connection with financial aid to a student;

Organizations conducting certain studies for or on behalf of the school;

Accrediting organizations;

To comply with a judicial order or lawfully issued subpoena;

Appropriate officials in cases of health and safety emergencies; and

State and local authorities, within a juvenile justice system, pursuant to specific State law.

Schools may disclose, without consent, "directory" information such as a student's name, address, telephone number, date and place of birth, honors and awards, and dates of attendance. However, schools must tell parents and eligible students about directory information and allow parents and eligible students a reasonable amount of time to request that the school not disclose directory information about them. Schools must notify parents and eligible students annually of their rights under FERPA. The actual means of notification (special letter, inclusion in a PTA bulletin, student handbook, or newspaper article) is left to the discretion of each school.

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policy; privacy; academic records; technical assistance; parent rights; student rights; ferpa

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Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA)

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Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA) Home Page.

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2.  U.S. Department of Education (Safeguarding Student Privacy)

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2.  U.S. Department of Education (Safeguarding Student Privacy)

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3.  U.S. Department of Education (Office of Educational Technology)

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3.  U.S. Department of Education (Office of Educational Technology)

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Featured Publications

New education technologies often raise questions about how best to protect student privacy during use. This document addresses privacy and security considerations relating to computer software, mobile applications, and web-based tools provided by a third-party to a school or district that students and/or their parents access via the Internet and use as part of a school activity. It presents some requirements and best practices to consider when evaluating the use of online educational services.

This brief offers best practice recommendations for developing and implementing effective authentication processes to help ensure that only appropriate individuals and entities have access to education records. General suggestions provided in the brief are applicable to all modes of data access, be it in person, over the phone, by mail, or electronically.

The Privacy Technical Assistance Center, working with the Department of Education's Family Policy Compliance office, recently released a framework for edtech tools' Terms of Service Agreements. This document is intended to assist users in understanding how a given online service or app will collect, use and/or transmit user information so that they can then decide whether or not to sign up. It is recommended that developers align their Terms of Service Agreements with these best practices.

Featured Resources

The U.S. Department of Education runs the Privacy Technical Assistance Center (PTAC) as a "one-stop" resource for answering questions and addressing concerns related to privacy, confidentiality, and security practices. PTAC provides timely information and updated guidance on privacy, confidentiality, and security practices through a variety of resources, including training materials and opportunities to receive direct assistance with privacy, security, and confidentiality of student data systems.

Email and Student Privacy

School Volunteers and FERPA

Developing a Privacy Program for your District

Overview of Federal Regulations

Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA)

FERPA is a Federal law that protects the privacy of student education records. The law applies to all schools that receive funds from the U.S. Department of Education. FERPA gives parents certain rights with respect to their children's education records. These rights transfer to the student when he or she reaches the age of 18 or attends a school beyond the high school level.

Children's Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA)

The primary goal of COPPA is to place parents in control over what information is collected from their young children online. COPPA was designed to protect children under age 13 while accounting for the dynamic nature of the Internet. The Rule applies to operators of commercial websites and online services (including mobile apps) directed to children under 13 that collect, use, or disclose personal information from children, and operators of general audience websites or online services with actual knowledge that they are collecting, using, or disclosing personal information from children under 13. The Rule also applies to websites or online services that have actual knowledge that they are collecting personal information directly from users of another website or online service directed to children. Read more

Children's Internet Protection Act (CIPA)

CIPA was enacted by Congress in 2000 to address concerns about children's access to obscene or harmful content over the Internet. CIPA imposes certain requirements on schools or libraries that receive discounts for Internet access or internal connections through the E-rate program. Read more

Protection of Pupil Rights Amendment (PPRA)

PPRA is intended to protect the rights of parents and students in two ways:

It seeks to ensure that schools and contractors make instructional materials available for inspection by parents if those materials will be used in connection with an ED-funded survey, analysis, or evaluation in which their children participate; and

It seeks to ensure that schools and contractors obtain written parental consent before minor students are required to participate in any ED-funded survey, analysis, or evaluation that reveals certain information.

PPRA applies to programs that receive funding from the U.S. Department of Education. Read more

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Privacy - Office of Educational Technology

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Featured Publications Featured Resources Overview of Federal Regulations Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA) FERPA is a Federal law that protects the privacy of student education records. The law applies to all schools that receive funds from the U.S. Department of Education. FERPA gives parents certain rights with respect to their children's education records.

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4.  U.S. Department of Education (Student Privacy 101)

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4.  U.S. Department of Education (Student Privacy 101)

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The U.S. Department of Education is committed to student privacy. We administer the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA), and we provide technical assistance to help schools and school districts use best practices in their use and management of information about students. This site aims to assist stakeholders in protecting the privacy of students by providing official guidance on FERPA , technical best practices and the answers to Frequently Asked Questions. Responsibility for the Department's student privacy operations lies in the Office of the Chief Privacy Officer. To learn more about FERPA please click on the video to the right.

Family Educational Rights Privacy Act (FERPA)

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The U.S. Department of Education is committed to student privacy. We administer the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA), and we provide technical assistance to help schools and school districts use best practices in their use and management of information about students.

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2. Tips for Parents and Adult-Age Students

3. Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA)

3b. Access to Education Records

3d. Uses of the Social Security Number

3e. Directory Information
3g. FERPA Amendments Effective January 3, 2012
5. Videotaping and Photography

6. Internet Publication of Information and/or Images

7. Surveys and Questionnaires

8. Surveillance Cameras

9. Issues Specific to Colleges and Universities
1. Introduction
10. Safeguarding Education Records

As soon as your child enters preschool, information is collected about him or her. The body of information grows throughout the child's academic career.

School records contain highly sensitive information, even information about the family. The contents of student files are likely to have an impact on the overall educational experience of students. That is why it is wise for parents and adult-age students to be informed about laws and policies that govern student information.

Privacy abuses can range from grades bandied about in hallways to the nonconsensual exposure of student information and photos on the Internet. In today's climate of heightened security, it is more important than ever for parents and adult-age students to be vigilant about who has access to education records.

Federal law, the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act, protects student records to some extent. FERPA, commonly known as the "Buckley Amendment," is one of the oldest privacy laws on the books, implemented in 1974. Most states have enacted similar laws.

FERPA applies to schools that receive federal funds through a program of the U.S. Department of Education. Most schools fall into this category. Recent federal laws such as the USA Patriot Act and the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001 have somewhat changed the privacy landscape.

Rapid advances in technology have stretched privacy laws to the limit. The Internet, now in use in nearly all U.S. schools, opens the door for instantaneous and widespread dissemination of student information.

Incidents of school violence in recent years have prompted school administrators and parents to debate the issue of privacy versus security. Events such as the 1999 Columbine shootings and the 2007 tragedy at Virginia Tech have resulted in increased security measures in our schools. Metal detectors and surveillance cameras are now a fact of life in many schools. At the same time, institutions have been uncertain about how to balance student privacy against safety interests, especially when information is about students who are over 18 years old.

This guide discusses privacy-related laws in education and covers emerging issues in security and informational privacy. The issues covered here pertain to students in the K-12 grades as well as college-level records. Additional issues specific to post-secondary education are discussed in Part 9.
2. Tips for Parents and Adult-Age Students
This fact sheet does not cover drug testing. You can find resources for additional information about education privacy at the end of this guide, Part 11.

If you read nothing else in this guide, be aware of all the ways you can actively monitor and limit the uses of student information. Learn how to safeguard the confidentiality of these records to the extent possible under the law.

1. Read everything that is sent home with your child from school or sent in the mail. Pay attention to the fine print. Look for terms such as "personally identifiable information," "directory information," and "opt-out." It is easy, especially at the start of a new school year, to feel overwhelmed with paperwork. Take the time to read documents regarding privacy information. They matter.

2. Always question why information about the student is being requested. If you are told that the request is mandated by law or policy, ask for a copy.

3. Find out how your school defines "directory information." Request the opt-out form if you do not want directory information about your child to be released to third parties. This can include descriptive information such as name, address, telephone number, date of birth, major field of study, school activities, key dates, and more. Schools are required to give parents the right to opt-out of the release of directory information. The trend is for schools to expand directory information to include many more types of student data.

4. Ask for a copy of the school or district policy on surveys and third-party access to personal student information. And ask for a copy of survey questionnaires that are given to your child. The school may not give this, but it is worth the effort and signals to the school that you are concerned about this issue.

Who is conducting the study?

What is the purpose of the study?

Is any personally identifiable information required?

Who is compiling, reviewing, storing the data?

When is the data destroyed?

Can I refuse to have my child participate? What are the consequences, if any, if my child does not participate?

What are my rights under federal and state law?

5. Teach your child to tell you about surveys and questionnaires. Ask how you can "opt-out" of a survey, test, or other process that makes you uncomfortable. You can contact the school and ask:

6. Ask for a copy of the school or district policy regarding requests to access the education record. Always make such requests in writing. Keep a copy for yourself. Send all correspondence certified "return receipt requested" so you can confirm that the school received your letter.

7. Ask for a copy of school or district policy regarding the videotaping and photographing of students. Similarly, ask about its policy regarding the publication of student information and photographs on school-sponsored Internet web sites. If the school has no policy, work with other parents to contact the board and request that such policies be adopted.

8. Keep in mind that your child may participate in programs that are not formally sponsored by the school, but may be associated with the school nonetheless. Find out if programs, such as sports and music activities, have web sites in which participating students are named and pictured. Although such programs are generally not covered by FERPA, you are wise to examine the organization's privacy policy and take advantage of consent opportunities. If the organization has no privacy policy and does not obtain consent before posting information and pictures about your child, complain to the program administrators as well as to appropriate school officials.

9. Request the opt-out form if you do not want your child contacted by military recruiters. Schools are required to inform you of your right to opt-out of recruitment contacts.

10. Review your child's education record periodically. Once a year is recommended, twice is preferable, especially if you have special concerns.

11. Ask to see the access log for the education records of your child at least twice a year, more often if you have special concerns. These logs show who has accessed the records as well as further disclosures made by state or federal authorities.

12. If your child experiences a breach in confidentiality of student records or another kind of privacy abuse, document it carefully in writing. In addition to talking to teachers, staff, and/or administrators about the matter, write a letter to the appropriate administrator and, if necessary, the board. File a complaint with the U.S. Department of Education if it appears that the school has violated federal law.

13. If a privacy-invasive situation that your child has experienced is widespread or systemic, organize with other parents. Go to the board and work with the school to change the policy
What are the major federal laws that govern the privacy of education records?

Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA) 20 USC 1232g (1974)

Protection of Pupil's Rights Amendments (PPRA) 20 USC 1232h (1978)

No Child Left Behind Act of 2001, Pub. L. 107-110, 115 STAT. 1425 (January 2002)

USA Patriot Act, P.L. 107-56 (October 26, 2001)

Privacy Act of 1974, 5 USC Part I, Ch. 5, Subch. 11, Sec. 552

Campus Sex Crimes Prevention Act (Pub. L. 106-386)

. 3. Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA)
What are the most important things to know about FERPA?
FERPA is the best known and most influential of the laws governing student privacy. Oversight and enforcement of FERPA rests with the U.S. Department of Education. FERPA has recently undergone some changes since the enactment of the No Child Left Behind Act and the USA Patriot Act, discussed below.

FERPA gives parents and adult-age students some rights to the privacy of the student education record. Under FERPA, adult-age students are those who have reached the age of 18 or who attend post-secondary school, even though not yet 18 years of age. For example, a 17-year-old who is enrolled in college would be considered "adult-age."

The right of parents and adult-age students to inspect and receive a copy of student records.

The right to deny access to others, specifically those outside the school system, with some exceptions.

A process to correct errors, including a hearing.

The right to opt-out of military recruitment.

The right to opt-out of the disclosure of a student's directory information.

A complaint process, handled by the Family Compliance Office of the U.S. Department of Education.

The law provides:

It does not give individuals the right to sue the school. Only the U.S. Department of Education can sanction schools that have violated FERPA.

It puts the burden on students and parents to respond to opt-out opportunities, such as disclosure of directory information.

It does not dictate requirements for safeguarding education records.

What institutions must comply with the requirements of FERPA?
FERPA has some significant shortcomings:

FERPA applies to all schools that receive funds from the U.S. Department of Education. In short, all public elementary and secondary schools are subject to FERPA. In addition, FERPA applies to colleges and universities, whether public or private, whose students receive financial assistance from the federal government. Private educational institutions that receive no federal funds under any applicable program are exempt. These are few and far between.

The Family Compliance Office (FPCO) oversees FERPA. For more information about this law and the mission of this Office, visit the U.S. Department of Education's Web site at www.ed.gov/policy/gen/guid/fpco/index.html. As part of its oversight duties, FPCO has adopted regulations that supplement FERPA.

The agency's core regulations as well as major amendments adopted in December 2008 can be found on the office's Web site at www.ed.gov/policy/gen/guid/fpco/ferpa/index.html. In addition, FPCO's Web site provides guidance on various aspects of FERPA to students, parents, teachers and school administrators.

Are my child's medical records in school files also covered by HIPAA, the federal medical Privacy Rule?

Generally, medical records maintained by a health care provider or other HIPAA "covered entity" are covered by the HIPAA Privacy Rule. For minors, a parent's written authorization is ordinarily necessary under HIPAA for a doctor, for example, to provide medical information to a school. Once medical information is in school files, that information becomes an "education" record subject to FERPA.

On January 25, 2013, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services adopted sweeping modifications to the HIPAA Privacy Rule. One revision to the Privacy Rule allows health providers to disclose student immunization records to schools based on a parent's oral agreement.
What exactly are education records?
For further details about the application of FERPA and HIPAA, see the agencies' joint guidance on this topic.

The student's name and address as well as the name and address of parents and family members.

Personal identifiers such as Social Security number or student number.

A list of personal characteristics or other information that would make the studentís identity easily traceable.

Indirect identifiers such as the studentís date or place of birth and motherís maiden name.

Under FERPA, education records consist of "anything directly related to a student" that is maintained by an educational agency or institution. According to FERPA, as supplemented by the Department of Education's regulations, information directly related to a student is "personally identifiable information." This includes:

Amendments to FERPA regulations effective January 8, 2009, add "biometric record" as a personal identifier. Examples of biometric records include fingerprints, retina and iris patterns, voiceprints, DNA sequences, facial characteristics and handwriting.

Information that, alone or in combination, is linked or linkable to a specific student.

Information requested by a person who the institution believes knows the identity of the student to whom the education record relates

The amendments also recognize that a student may be identified even without disclosure of a specific data point. As such, the definition of "personally identifiable information" now includes:
What are not considered education records?
Education records include much more than test scores or class standing. They can include health information, description of physical appearance, family economic circumstances, criminal history, ethnic background, political and religious affiliations, and psychological test results. The information can be a fact such as birth date or a Social Security number. And it can include teachers' opinions of your child. This is not an exhaustive list.

Records of teachers and administrators that are kept in their sole possession and not revealed to any other individuals except a substitute teacher. These are "teacher's notes."

Records of a law enforcement unit of the educational institution, such as the campus security office.

Medical and/or psychological records of a student who is at least 18 years of age or who is attending a post-secondary institution when such records are maintained by health care professionals and are used solely in a professional or paraprofessional capacity for treatment purposes. The adult-age student may offer those records to another physician or professional of his or her choice.

Personnel records of those individuals employed by the educational institution.

Are records of home-schooled students covered?
FERPA is very specific in listing what items are not included in the definition of education records. These include:
Do parents have a right to see their children's education records?
Through a quirk of the law, the records of home-schooled students are not protected by FERPA. Currently, report cards and other records of home-schooled children are considered public information if they have been shared with public school districts. Since many states require this sharing of information, such records have not been provided privacy protection under FERPA. Some members of Congress have introduced legislation to amend FERPA to include home-schooled students. (To find bills on this topic, visit the Congressional Web site Thomas and do a "word/phrase" search on the term "home school." http://thomas.loc.gov/home/thomas.php)

Yes. Parents or adult-age students may review their records including medical or psychiatric evaluations. A parent may request and must be provided with a list of the kinds of information being stored and who to contact to retrieve them for review. Keep in mind that records are often kept in more than one school office. Be sure to ask school officials where records are filed and who to contact to retrieve them for review.

The right of access provided under FERPA does not prevent a school from withholding transcripts or other official recognition of completed work until all tuition, fees, and other charges are paid to the school. Many states have laws which allow schools to set up procedural guidelines, including the fulfillment of all financial obligations, before records are released. FERPA does not prevent states from establishing individual procedures for how records are released.

Recent amendments to FERPA regulations specify that parents of adult age children can receive information from education records when the health or safety of the student or another person is threatened. This clarification was prompted at least in part by the April 2007 shootings at Virginia Polytechnic Institute.

The Department of Education's latest rules make it clear that a health and safety emergency trumps privacy. If the institution identifies an emergency, information may be disclosed to parents regardless of whether the student is a dependent for federal income tax purposes. The Department has signaled that it will not second-guess an institution's decision to disclose information in an emergency situation.

The right to review does not include the records of a school where one sought admission but was not accepted. Informal notes kept by teachers, as long as that information is made available only to substitute teachers or other school administrators, are also not included.
Who may have access to these records without parental/eligible student consent?
Many school districts are beginning to offer parents online access to the student's educational information, such as grades, homework assignments, and progress reports. If you are concerned about the security of online records, be sure to discuss this with school personnel. Ask how records are protected from illegitimate access. For example, are records encrypted? Does the school employ audit trails to monitor access? All too often, online security is deficient. Insist that school officials give you specific information about the strategies they employ to keep records secure and accessible only to those with a legitimate right of access.

Unfortunately, FERPA does not include steps institutions must take to safeguard education records.

All too often computer systems, particularly at the college and university level, are a prime target of hackers and identity thieves. For more of safeguarding education records, see Part 10 of this guide.

The law is clear on who may access education records without parental consent. But note the word may. A parent could request, for example, that records not be released to another school, and it would then be up to the school to deny or approve the request. Even though a request may fall under one of the exceptions to parental consent, the school could still refuse to release education records to that individual.

Parents themselves, students 18 or older, or students who attend a school past high school no matter what their age. In other words, a 17-year old who attends college would have the same access as students age 18 and older.

School officials who have been determined to have legitimate need to view the records. These would include teachers and administrators within the same school. However, in its annual notification of FERPA rights, a school must disclose the criteria it uses to determine who it deems to be a "school official" as well as what constitutes a legitimate educational interest needed to view records.

Officials of other schools or school systems to which the student is being transferred. In this case, however, the student's parents must be notified of the transfer and receive a copy if they wish.

State educational agencies (SEAs) may disclose information about a student's scores on state assessments to other schools within the state where a student seeks or intends to enroll.

Contractors, consultants, and other parties to whom a state educational agency has outsourced services or functions provided the state agency has direct control over the outside party.

Financial aid purposes. This includes government agencies as well as private banks involved in the financial aid process.

Organizations conducting studies for educational institutions to develop or evaluate tests, student aid programs, or to improve education. Personally identifiable information must not be disclosed to anyone other than representatives of the organization, and such information must be destroyed when no longer needed. A written agreement is required for study disclosures.

In cases of emergency, appropriate persons, including parents of an adult student, may gain access if the information is needed to protect the health or safety of the student or others.

Those who can access education records include the following:

The Comptroller General of the United States and the Secretary of the Department of Education. The Comptroller General has certain statutory authority to conduct audits. To date there have been no such audits of education records, but this provision is included in case such a review is necessary. State educational authorities may also have access for purposes of gathering data to audit and evaluate federally-supported education programs.

Representatives of the U.S. Attorney General for law enforcement purposes. Personally identifiable information is supposed to be destroyed once no longer required.

State and local officials may access the records if the state enacted a statute before November 19, 1974, that specifically granted this access for juvenile justice system purposes. If the state statute was enacted after November 19,1974, the access must still relate to juvenile justice system needs. But officials must also certify in writing to the school that they will not disclose the information to any third party except as state law allows, without the written consent of the parent.

In response to a grand jury subpoena, the educational institution may release records. But it may not reveal to anyone the existence or contents of the subpoena or what information was furnished.

In response to any other subpoena issued for a law enforcement purpose, the educational institution may release records. Again, the existence or contents of the subpoena may not be disclosed to anyone and any information furnished must remain confidential.

Government officials who can access student records without parental consent include these:

When, under the USA Patriot Act, the United States Attorney, during the course of a terrorism investigation, obtains an ex parte court order, that is an order issued without notice to the subject.

When, under the Campus Sex Crimes Prevention Act, an institution discloses information about sex offenders or other individuals required to register under the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act of 1994, commonly called the Wetterling Act.

Recent amendments to the FERPA regulations include two additional instances that allow disclosure without consent. These are:
Can these individuals or agencies then share the information with third parties?
For more on access to student records, see the Legislative History of Major FERPA Provisions, www.ed.gov/policy/gen/guid/fpco/ferpa/leg-history.html
How can I find out who has requested access to my child's education records?
No. Parents, in most cases, must give written consent before information is divulged to another party. Should information be shared inappropriately, the party who was granted access may be barred from accessing education records for at least five years.

Each educational agency must maintain a record, typically called an access log. It lists all individuals who requested or were given access to a student's records. The log must also include the legitimate interest each person had to justify access. The log itself is subject to certain safeguards. Only parents and school officials responsible for custody of school records may view the log.
How long is information stored by the school and in what form is it kept?
Can a school or university withhold a transcript until all fees are paid in full?

Yes. The right of access provided under FERPA does not prevent a school from withholding transcripts or other official recognition of completed work until all tuition, fees, and other charges are paid to the school. Many states have laws that allow schools to set up procedural guidelines, including the fulfillment of all financial obligations, before records are released. FERPA does not prevent states from establishing individual procedures for how records are released.
What if a parent or adult-age student believes an item in the school record is incorrect?
FERPA does not require that institutions maintain records for a specified period of time unless there is an outstanding request by a parent or adult-age student to inspect the records. But educational institutions must use reasonable methods to ensure that information is protected. This includes protecting the integrity of e-mail files and Internet Web sites, including inhouse Intranet systems. FERPA does not mandate the specific method of achieving this goal. Districts are likely to have their own retention policies.

The parent can request in writing that the school amend any information they believe is inaccurate. If the school does not do so within a reasonable period of time, the parent has the right to a hearing.
Is my child's Social Security number (SSN) part of the education record?
The request should be made in writing to the proper administrative official, for instance the principal. The hearing must be held within a "reasonable time" after the request is made. FERPA gives parents an opportunity to argue the need for correction. A decision must be given to the parents and the school district in writing within a "reasonable time."

Your child's Social Security number is considered part of the education record, falling under the protection of FERPA. In a 1992 case brought by students against Rutgers University, the court confirmed that the SSN is an education record. It ruled that Rutgers must not list students' SSNs on class rosters. (Krebs v. Rutgers, 797 F. Supp. 1246 (D.N.J. 1992)), ( www.p-o-v-image.com/Krebs_v_Rutgers_opinion.pdf)

Another federal law, the Privacy Act of 1974, also places limitations on uses of the SSN. It states that a government agency cannot "deny to any individual any right, benefit, or privilege provided by law because of such individual's refusal to disclose his social security account number." It also requires agencies to provide a SSN disclosure notice, stating whether or not disclosure is mandatory or voluntary and what uses will be made of the SSN. (Section 7 of the Privacy Act, 5 U.S.C. § 552a note)

The U.S. Department of Education and Department of Justice interpret the Privacy Act as prohibiting a public school district from requiring a pupil or parent to provide an SSN or denying admittance because a pupil does not provide an SSN.

If you do not want your child's SSN used for identification purposes, you should request that your school allow you to use an alternate number. If you meet with resistance, cite the law and be persistent.

For more information on using Social Security numbers in educational institutions, read:
What is "directory information" and how is it different from education records?
A California law limits the display and disclosure of SSNs, including as student identifiers. The law was phased in between 2002 and 2007. (See California Civil Code 1798.85, and Senate Bill 25 (2003, Bowen), at www.leginfo.ca.gov.) To learn more about laws in other states, visit the Web site for the National Council of State Legislatures, www.ncsl.org

Educational institutions may disclose certain categories of information about a student without parental consent or the consent of the adult-age student. Schools must notify parents and eligible students of the information that may be released and must allow a reasonable amount of time for the parent or adult-age student to request that the information not be disclosed.

Student's name

Address

Telephone listing

Electronic mail address

Photograph

Date and place of birth

Major field of study

Grade level

Enrollment status (e.g. undergraduate or graduate, full-time or part-time)

Participation in officially recognized activities and sports

Weight and height of members of athletic teams

Dates of attendance

Degrees, honors and awards received

Name of the most recent previous educational agency or institution attended by the student.

Under FERPA, directory information can include:

The Department of Education has now eliminated the Social Security number as a data bit allowed in directory information. Student identification (ID) numbers have also now been excluded from directory information except when the ID number cannot be used to gain access to education records.

Each educational institution is responsible for giving parents and adult-age students notice of the categories that are considered directory information at that institution. Parents and adult-age students may refuse permission to the school to release this information if they inform the school in writing, in other words, if they "opt-out."
What recourse is available should I feel my rights or the rights of my child have been violated under FERPA?
The law does not define for schools what they must designate as directory information, and the list is growing. Because directory information can be given to third parties unless parents have opted out, you will want to monitor what your school proposes to add to the list. Be sure to raise objections with the school board if you disagree with the school's expansion of categories considered to be directory information.

In 2002 the U.S. Supreme Court decision ruled that individuals do not have the right to sue under FERPA. In other words, there is no private right of action. ( Gonzaga Univ. v. Doe, 536 U.S. 273) www.law.cornell.edu/supct/html/01-679.ZO.html

The only option available to parents under FERPA is to file a complaint with the Family Policy Compliance Office of the U.S. Department of Education. They are responsible for investigating, processing, reviewing, and adjudicating violations and complaints. Unfortunately, hearings are only conducted in regional offices. All other functions are performed from the Washington, D.C. office. See the Resources in Part 11 at the end of this fact sheet for contact information.

We recommend that before filing a complaint with the Compliance Office you exhaust your options for redress at the local level. This may mean contacting your school principal or district office in writing. It may also mean attending a board of education meeting to have your issue heard.
What happens if an educational institution is found to be in violation of FERPA?
Keep in mind that the FERPA office will follow many of these same steps. They will begin their investigation, in most cases, with a letter of notification to school officials. It may save time and minimize distress to contact your school officials directly. The process of achieving a positive outcome from the school district may be shortened by approaching officials first. Once the FERPA Office becomes involved, the school district may not be willing to discuss the issue with you directly. Sometimes the direct, personal approach is all that is needed to resolve the complaint.
Does the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB) increase privacy for student records?
That institution may be cut off from federal funding. This would be an extreme case and has not yet been implemented in FERPA's 30-year history. More likely, the FERPA office would require the school district to document and implement a policy and procedure to ensure that similar violations do not occur in the future.

NCLB touches on privacy concerns in only two ways. First, regarding military recruiters, as discussed in Part 4 of this guide, NCLB gives the parents the right to opt out to stop disclosures of student information. Second, as discussed in Part 7 of this guide, NCLB Act gives parents the right to review student surveys.

NCLB is not a privacy-focused law. In fact, an October 2009 study by Fordham University concludes that one byproduct of NCLB, states' reporting requirements, may pose a significant risk to privacy for K-12 age students. Data needed to meet NCLB's reporting requirements are compiled in what's called longitudinal databases.

Fordham's study found that most states collect information in excess of that needed to meet the reporting requirements of NCLB. Most troublesome of the study's findings is that some state databases include children's Social Security numbers, mental illnesses, jail sentences and family wealth information. FERPA's privacy protections for education records do not reach these state compiled databases.
3g. FERPA Amendments Effective January 3, 2012
To read the full Fordham University study as well as recommendations to improve on privacy, visit the Fordham Univeristy's web page on Children's Educational Records and Privacy.

On December 1, 2011, the U.S. Department of Education announced new FERPA rules that would allow "authorized representatives" to access private student data for user in statewide longitudinal data systems (SLDS). The rules would allow outside access for such purposes as audits, program effectiveness evaluations, and research. Neither parents nor adult students have a right to object or opt out of this new, widespread use of student data.

In comments submitted to the Department, the PRC expressed concern about the Department's move to expand access to student data beyond the original scope of FERPA. To read the PRC's May 23, 2011 comments, see: https://www.privacyrights.org/ferpa-comments-2011.

To read the December 1, 2011 press release announcing the final regulation, see: http://www.ed.gov/news/press-releases/us-education-department-announces-new-measures-safeguard-student-privacy.
4. Military Recruiters
To read the entire final regulation, see: http://www.federalregister.gov/articles/2011/12/02/2011-30683/family-educational-rights-and-privacy#h-6.

The No Child Left Behind law (NCLB), signed into law in 2002, requires schools to provide military recruiters with access to secondary school students' names, addresses, and telephone listings. FERPA also allows access, but the No Child Left Behind law gives it teeth. Schools must comply or risk losing federal funds.

NCLB amends the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA), the principal federal law affecting education from kindergarten through high school (K-12). Although NCLB deals primarily with issues such as learning standards and testing, it also includes two little-known provisions regarding privacy - military recruitment, which we discuss here, and surveys, covered below. The Department of Education Web site on NCLB is www.ed.gov/nclb/landing.jhtml

Can I prevent military recruiters from obtaining information about my child?

Yes. Your school must notify parents and secondary school students of the option of withholding that information from military recruiters. Look for this "opt-out" opportunity in notices typically sent by the school at the beginning of the year. Private secondary schools that maintain a religious objection to military service do not have to provide student information to recruiters.

There has been controversy regarding the provision since its inception. The boundaries and effects of this law have yet to be tested. To read a variety of viewpoints on the NCLB's military recruitment provision, use a search engine and search on the words "military recruitment no child left behind." (Do not include quotation marks in the search.)

Even if parents opt out, recruiters may still gain access to student data. FERPA's opt out provision does not apply when students take the Armed Services Vocational Aptitude Battery (ASVAB) examination. When it comes to ASVAB, student privacy protections, if any, come from schools and not FERPA or NCLB.

ASVAB, mandatory in many school districts for high school juniors, tests a student's abilities in a wide range of disciplines. Students taking ASVAB are asked to sign a privacy statement giving permission for their information to be used by military recruiters.

Schools often routinely forward ASVAB test results along with student contact information directly to military recruiters. At least one state, Hawaii, stopped giving student contact information and scores after a Navy investigation found that an aggressive recruiter misled high students. Hawaii's public schools will no longer give information to recruiters unless students go to an off-campus recruiting station and sign a form specifically requesting that their information be given to a recruiter.

In April 2010, Maryland became the first state to pass a law prohibiting public schools from automatically releasing ASVAB results. Now, test results can only be disclosed by students or their parents during visits to a military recruiting station.

The military supplements the contact lists it receives from schools with its own program. So even if your child has chosen to be removed from the lists shared with recruiters by the school, the military obtains contact information about 11th- and 12th-graders from driver's license applications, the Selective Service System and commercial vendors. To opt-out, send a letter with the student's full name, street address, city, state, ZIP code, telephone number and date of birth to:
5. Videotaping and Photographing Can my child be videotaped or photographed at school without my permission?
Joint Advertising
Market Research and Studies
Attention: Opt Out
4040 N. Fairfax Drive, Suite 200
Arlington, VA 22203-1613

FERPA does not have a provision regarding videotaping of students. However, once a videotape or photo is created and kept by the school, it becomes part of the student's education record and is protected under FERPA. In addition, depending on who is conducting the taping or photography and for what purpose, other protections may be granted under the Protection of Human Subject federal "common rule," discussed further in Part 7 on surveys below. (45 CFR Part 46)

For more on Protection of Human Subjects, see the Department of Education Web site: www.ed.gov/about/offices/list/ocfo/humansub.html
6. Internet Publication of Information and/or Images Can images or information on my child be posted on the school's Web site without consent?
Each school or district should have a policy regarding videotaping and photographing that includes a consent provision. The policy should contain provisions regarding videotaping and photographing students who participate in non-school activities that take place on or in their facilities. Ask for a copy of the policy. If the school has none, contact the administration and board in writing and suggest that they develop such a policy.

It depends. Publication on the Internet is considered a "disclosure" of information from the education record and must comply with FERPA. Information in the aggregate can be posted if students are not identified. However, directory information may be posted (released) without parental consent and in compliance with FERPA. That is why it is important to request, in writing, that the school not release directory information about the student.
Does the use of cloud-based services pose a privacy risk for student data?
School-supported clubs and organizations must comply with FERPA regulations. However, for activities like little league or soccer clubs, photographs are often taken and even posted on Web sites that are not associated with the school. This is not governed by FERPA. We recommend that you inquire about the Web site privacy policy of all clubs in which your child participates. Insist that they obtain your permission before posting anything about your child on the Internet.

Possibly. Many school districts use cloud services to manage school activities such as student performance, assignments, transportation and payments. A December 13, 2013 study released by Fordham University's Center on Law and Information found that although 95% of school districts use cloud services most vendor contracts lack even fundamental privacy protections.

The Fordham study notes various shortcomings in the vendor contracts examined. For example, according to the study, few agreements specify the purpose of disclosures and most fail to restrict a vendor's ability to sell or market student information. Lack of notice to parents, inadequate data security, and unspecified data retention periods were among other findings. Schools also failed to maintain control of student data even though FERPA requires school districts to maintain direct control of student data shared with outside service providers.
7. Surveys and Questionnaires
To read the full study, along with Fordham's recommendations for improving privacy, see: Privacy and Cloud Computing in Public Schools

My child is often given questionnaires or surveys in school. How can I protect my child from inappropriate questioning or improper use of private information?

The Protection of Pupil Rights Amendment (PPRA) and the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001 govern surveys in publicly funded schools. The rules are designed to control the use, dissemination, and protection of the data. (20 USC §1232h; 34 CFR Part 98)

Political affiliations

Mental and psychological problems that are potentially embarrassing

Sex behavior and attitudes

Illegal, anti-social, self-incriminating, and demeaning behavior

Critical appraisals of family members

Legally recognized privileged relationships, such as those of lawyers, physicians, and priests

Religious practices, affiliations or beliefs

Income other than that required by law to determine eligibility for financial assistance.

The PPRA requires that parents provide written consent before students are given a survey conducted by the U.S. Department of Education and supported by federal funds. The law governs surveys, analyses, and evaluations that include questions on these topics:
How has the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001 changed my rights under FERPA?
For additional information about PPRA, visit the U.S. Department of Education Web site at www.ed.gov/policy/gen/guid/fpco/ppra/index.html.

The No Child Left Behind Act was signed into law by President Bush in January of 2002. The Act requires school districts to meet new educational standards to continue receiving federal aid. In addition, school districts are required to develop policies and procedures to protect the personal information of children from marketing groups and testing companies. ( www.ed.gov/nclb/landing.jhtml)

The law applies to companies that provide school districts with information technology systems or Internet service as well as the more traditional written surveys. School districts must provide annual notices to parents about any plans for commercial surveys. Parents must be given an opportunity to review the survey and can veto their child's participation. In addition, the Act prohibits the development of a nationwide database containing personally identifiable information on individuals who participate in surveys or other data-gathering processes.

With the passage of the No Child Left Behind Act, schools and organizations that administer the surveys must also make instructional material available for inspection by parents if that material will be used in connection with an Education Department-funded survey, analysis, or evaluation.

When a survey is funded by an organization other than the U.S. Department of Education, new policies must be adopted to protect student privacy. Parents may inspect a survey created by a third party before it is administered. Arrangements must be made to protect student privacy when surveys are conducted that contain questions on topics covered in the PPRA (listed above).

The school must adopt policies on the administration of physical examinations and health screenings as well as the collection of personal information for marketing. Parents also have the right to inspect any instructional material used as part of the curriculum.

The educational institution must notify parents of these policies at least once a year. Ask for a copy of the school or district policy on when and how parents are notified of surveys and screenings in which students participate. Learn how to take advantage of the opt-out options available to you.

Activities involving the collection, disclosure, or use of personal information collected from students for marketing purposes.

The administration of any non-Department of Education funded survey that contains one of the eight items listed above in the section on the PPRA.

Any non-emergency, invasive physical examination or health screening that is required as a condition of attendance or is not necessary to protect the immediate health and safety of the student or other students.

The law requires schools to offer parents the opportunity to opt-out of the following:

Be aware, however, that certain surveys are exempt from this provision. Surveys or other techniques that are used to develop educational items, book clubs, and the like do not face the same restrictions as other surveys for commercial purposes because of their perceived benefit to the educational process.
8. Surveillance Cameras Can my child's school place surveillance cameras throughout the halls and classrooms?
If your child is asked to participate in an ongoing study, additional privacy protection is granted under the federal "common rule entitled" Protection of Human Subject. (45 CFR Part 46) This provision is called a federal common rule because seventeen federal agencies subscribe to it, and so it is "common" to those agencies.

In addition to violating federal education laws, private survey companies that engage in deceptive practices are also subject to the Federal Trade Commission Act. To read about the Federal Trade Commission's actions against student survey companies, see: www.ftc.gov/opa/2003/01/ecra.shtm.

State attorneys general have also filed lawsuits against private survey companies, both for deceptive practices and for failing to disclose how students can opt out.

Yes. Since the Columbine school shootings in 1999, many schools have installed surveillance cameras in an effort to keep schools safe. Cameras may be placed in areas except those where individuals would have a "reasonable expectation of privacy," such as restrooms. Many schools are now installing cameras in the classrooms as well as hallways and common areas.

There are many unanswered questions about the effectiveness and long-term impacts of video surveillance. Do cameras deter crime, or do they just move it to other areas? Does pervasive surveillance have harmful impacts on students and teachers? While some praise the cameras, others criticize video surveillance for promoting an atmosphere of mistrust and suspicion. We are not aware of conclusive statistics that prove whether or not cameras are effective in curtailing violence and other criminal behavior.

If cameras are installed, we recommend that the school adopt a privacy and security policy that covers the rights and responsibilities of students, teachers, and other school personnel. The policy should include the purposes of video surveillance, who will have access to the stored files, how long the files will be stored, destruction of digital files, and to what uses the files will be put. Students and teachers should be advised if files will be used to judge performance.
9. Issues Specific to Colleges and Universities
Ask for a copy of the school or district policy on the use of surveillance cameras. If the school has no such policy, or if you feel its policy does not properly spell out the school's practices regarding purpose, access, storage, retention, destruction, and related matters, raise your concerns in writing with the administrators and the board.
Are college disciplinary proceedings protected by FERPA?
FERPA applies to any post-secondary institutions that receive funds from the U.S. Department of Education.

There is a distinction between disciplinary actions for violations of rules and violent offenses.
Violations of school policies become part of the education record and are protected under FERPA.

The Student Right to Know and Campus Security Act of 1990 created exceptions for violent crimes and sexual assault. A victim of a crime of violence or a sex offense may be informed of the final results of any disciplinary proceeding against the accused. If the accused is found to have committed the acts, the public may be informed of the result as well.
Can a student request copies of letters of recommendation sent to a college?
This law states final results of any disciplinary proceeding can only include the name of the student, the violation committed, and any sanction imposed by the institution on that student. The name of the victim or any witnesses can only be included with their written consent.

Students may request and receive copies of letters of recommendation dated after January 1, 1975, unless they sign a waiver relinquishing that right of access. Even after signing a waiver, a student may request the names of the persons furnishing recommendations. If a letter is used for any purpose other than as a recommendation, any waivers become invalid and the student may receive copies.
Can adult-age students review their medical or psychiatric records stored by the school?
A school may not require that a student sign a waiver in order to be accepted at the school or to receive financial aid or any other services from the school.

Under FERPA, medical and/or psychological records of an adult-age student or a student who attends a post-secondary institution that receives public funds, are not considered education records. This is only the case, however, if those records are maintained by health care professionals and are used only for treatment purposes. A student may request that the health care professional release records to another health care provider at any time.
Can adult-age students review financial records of their parents placed in their educational files?
Many schools are now choosing to include these records as part of a student's education record, thus allowing the student access at any time.
What are the impacts of the terrorist attacks of 9/11 on foreign students?
No. Financial records of parents are not released to adult-age students attending post-secondary institutions. (31 USC 1232g(a)(1)(C)(i))
How has the USA Patriot Act altered how colleges and universities collect and disseminate information regarding their international students?
The USA Patriot Act was passed into law just weeks after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. The Act expands the powers of agencies like the FBI and the CIA. Those expanded powers include tracking communications on the Internet, telephone, and computer wiretapping, and easier access to personal information such as medical, financial, and education records. (P.L. 107-56 October 26, 2001)

The Student and Exchange Visitor Information System (SEVIS) is a foreign student tracking database mandated by the USA Patriot Act. The database is to be used to track and monitor international students, numbering over 500,000 by some estimates.

The information is shared with the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), an agency within the Department of Homeland Security. Information collected includes the amount and sources of funding, arrests, disciplinary action, off campus employment, changes in address, and enrollment data.

Schools are electronically notified when a student has entered the United States. If that student does not register within 30 days of that date, the college must notify ICE. A college or university not utilizing the SEVIS database may not accept foreign students.

All universities and colleges that are hosts to international students must use SEVIS to report certain biographical information to the federal authorities. This information is recorded for nonimmigrant students (F and M visa) and exchange visitors (J visa), and their dependents (F-2, M-2, and J-2). As of August 1, 2003, all international students, except those holding diplomatic passports, must be recorded.
10. Safeguarding Education Records
For additional information on SEVIS, visit the ICE Web site, www.ice.gov/sevis/students/. Additional information can be found on the U.S. Department of State Web site. http://j1visa.state.gov/sponsors/current/sevis/

May school officials disclose information about registered sex offenders?

Yes. The Campus Sex Crimes Prevention Act allows campus officials to make such information available to the school community. This includes information provided to the institution under State sex offender registration and community notification programs.
11. Resources Filing Complaints under FERPA Other U.S. Department of Education Web Sites Additional Resources for Parents Digging Deeper: Related Reports on Privacy and Education

Privacy and the Handling of Student Information in the Electronic Networked Environments of Colleges and Universities. Published by CAUSE, the Association for Managing and Using Information Resources in Higher Education. 1997. Task force members: Susan Ferencz, Laurence Alvarez, Glair Goldsmith, Kathleen Kimball, Robert Morley, Trang Pham, Robert Ellis Smith, Steven Worona, and Virginia Rezmierski. http://net.educause.edu/ir/library/pdf/pub3102.pdf

Guidelines for Postsecondary Institutions for Implementation of the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act of 1974 as Amended. 1995. Prepared by Committee for AACRAO. American Association of Collegiate Registrars and Admissions Officers (202) 293-9161.

Make no mistake. Data kept in school files is every bit as sensitive as that kept by banks and health care providers. In fact, education records often include some of the same information found at your bank or medical facility. Personal information such as name, address, birth dates, Social Security number and more are necessarily a part of education records. Add to that credit and debit card information, tax returns, bank account numbers and personal identification numbers (PINs).
http://www.perkinscoie.com/statebreachchart/
With all this personal data housed in one place, it is little wonder that education records are at high risk for identity theft. According to the Department of Education, "[c]omputer systems at colleges and universities have become favored targets because they hold many of the same records as banks but are much easier to access." (73 Fed Register 74806, 74843 (December 9, 2008)

Indeed, postsecondary institutions have seen a significant number of data security breaches in recent years. For example, in the most recent amendments to FERPA, the Department references a Privacy Rights Clearinghouse report that found 93 documented computer breaches of electronic files between February 15, 2005, and November 19, 2005. For more on the Department's statement and general discussion about safeguarding education records, see pages 74843-74844 of the latest regulations: www.ed.gov/legislation/FedRegister/finrule/2008-4/120908a.pdf

Does FERPA require schools to adopt safeguarding procedures?

No. In this regard, FERPA has not kept pace with other privacy laws such asof the federal Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act (GLB), 15 U.S.C.§§ 6801-6810), and the Department of Health and Human Services rules adopted under the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA).

To learn more about safeguarding requirements for financial records required by GLB, see PRC Fact Sheet 24(e), Is Your Financial Information Safe?, www.privacyrights.org/fs/fs24e-FinInfo.htm

For more on the safeguarding requirements of HIPAA, see PRC Fact Sheet 8(a), HIPAA Basics: Medical Privacy in the Electronic Age, www.privacyrights.org/fs/fs8a-hipaa.htm

Does FERPA require the school have to notify me if there has been a data security breach?

No. FERPA only requires that the school record the disclosure. To learn about such a breach, parents or adult students would have make a request to inspect the student's records. Although FERPA does not mandate disclosure of a data security breach, most states have adopted laws that would require such notice. To find out about data breach laws in your state, visit

This guide has been developed with funding from
the Judith and Alfred A. Rosenberg Family Foundation.

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Privacy in Education: Guide for Parents and Adult-Age Students

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2. Tips for Parents and Adult-Age Students 3. Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA) 3b. Access to Education Records 3d. Uses of the Social Security Number 3e. Directory Information 3g. FERPA Amendments Effective January 3, 2012 5. Videotaping and Photography 6. Internet Publication of Information and/or Images 7.

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1.  Academic Dishonesty and the Internet in Higher Education

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1.  Academic Dishonesty and the Internet in Higher Education

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To most educators, the essential element to the success of their mission is academic integrity. It can be said that higher education as well as society will benefit from standards of integrity that pave the way for vibrant academic life, promote scientific progress, and prepare students for responsible citizenship. Despite efforts to uphold such principles, academic dishonesty is a growing concern for most educational institutions. Academic dishonesty has been a problem in schools as long as schools have existed, but over the past decade researchers and teachers have reported a dramatic climb in the occurrence of academic dishonesty especially among students in higher education, seemingly sparked by the rise of the Internet. Although increased technological developments of the last twenty or so years have been critical in creating new aids in research and avenues for faculty to publish their works, the Internet has made it easier for students to plagiarize, fabricate, and tamper with information. Another important factor that can be considered is student confusion over the nature of originality and textual appropriation when it comes to using online resources. Because many students do not know exactly what constitutes cheating and plagiarism through the use of the Internet, it is becoming increasingly more common and acceptable among students to use sources found on the Internet in some way that is not in accordance with higher education institutions. With this, can it be proven that the growth of academic dishonesty been facilitated by the Internet and have the methods in which academic dishonesty is employed changed since is widespread prevalence?
What is Academic Dishonesty?
Academic Dishonesty, "includes 'cheating,' 'fraud,' and 'plagiarism,' the theft of ideas and other forms of intellectual property-whether they are published or not. (). This practice is commonly believe by many to endanger the quality of education and depreciate the authentic achievements of others. There are many different forms of academic dishonesty including plagiarism, cheating, fabrication and falsification, multiple submissions, misuse of academic materials, and complicity in academic dishonesty. Plagiarism is the use of another person's distinct ideas or words without acknowledgment. On the other hand, cheating involves the possession, communication, or use of any type of information not authorized by the instructor. Fabrication and falsification means to invent or counterfeit information by creating your own results or deliberately altering information in any academic exercise. Another form of academic dishonesty that is often overlooked is that of multiple submissions, meaning submitting academic work for which academic credit has already been earned. Misuse of academic materials includes stealing, destroying, or unauthorized possession/alteration/sale/purchase of any academic materials. Lastly, complicity in academic dishonesty, sometimes overlooked, entails knowingly contributing to another's acts of academic dishonesty ().
Growth of Academic Dishonesty
The Internet has revolutionized the computer and world of communications like nothing ever before. The invention of the telegraph, telephone, radio and computer, set the stage for the unprecedented integration of capabilities that later arose with the invention of the Internet. It is generally agreed upon that the Internet reached public consciousness in the United States in the mid to late 1990s and with this later came the growth of academic dishonesty. Here are some studies and cases about academic dishonesty that lead to insight about its relation to the Internet:

In a study, "The Impact of Unethical Reasoning On Different Types of Academic Dishonesty: An Exploratory Study," the authors argue that there is an increase in academic dishonesty in the education system, which is concerning because it is suggested that those who cheat in college are more likely to cheat on the job. The idea that it is likely that students who cheat in academics are more likely to cheat in the business world coupled with the thought that academic dishonesty is on the rise, is problematic for it would seem to create an increasingly corrupt society. This is one of the reasons professors and academic institutions are concerned about this growing problem (Iyer 2008).

"A Campus Fad That's Being Copied: Internet Plagarism," is an article about how a study conducted in 2004 on 23 college campuses has found that Internet plagiarism is rising among students. Out of the undergraduate students surveyed said that in the last year they had engaged in some sort of Internet plagiarism without citation. In a similar survey three years earlier than this study, only 10 percent of students had acknowledged such cheating. This study in 2004, by Donald L. McCabe from Rutgers University, surveyed over 18,000 students, 2,6000 faculty members and 650 teaching assistants at large public universities and small private colleges nationwide, not including Ivy Leagues. Professor McCabe says, "There are a lot of students who are growing up with the Internet who are convinced that anything you find on the Internet is public knowledge and doesn't need to be cited." This studied revealed that about half the students who participated in the study considered Internet cheating to be trivial plagiarism while only twenty-two percent of undergraduates acknowledged that they have cheated in a "serious" way in the past year. According to the majority opinion of students, the more serious way of cheating is copying from another student on a test, using unauthorized notes or helping someone else to cheat on a test. Most students believe that cheating and plagiarism through the use of the Internet is less serious and therefore students are more likely to partake in this sort of plagiarism. The article also adds that administrators at Princeton have said that many times students as well as parents do not understand why it is wrong to using sections of text for academic word without using citation. The author ends by saying that colleges need to make it clear to their students what defines cheating and that is important to uphold principles of academic integrity in order to stop the growth of academic dishonesty within educational institutions (Rimer 2003).

In the article "Student Online Plagiarism: How Do We Respond?" the author talks about how it has been perceived that Internet plagiarism by college students is on the rise and that professors and administrators are alarmed. It reviews quantitative studies of student plagiarism over the past forty years, as well as how institutions have responded weakly. Lastly it offers strategies for addressing and preventing such plagiarism. The author reveals that quantitative studies based on student self-reports have reported high levels of academic dishonesty over several decades, but vary from 9 to 95 percent of students admitting to some form of academic dishonesty. It is found that Internet plagiarism is highly influenced by peer behavior on students' decisions to plagiarize and that it is on the rise among high school students. Because of this, it is now even more critical how colleges respond to such dishonesty. In the past, cheating and plagiarism was more time consuming, as it required students to obtain books, read, and copy. Now students can find online resources in a matter of seconds, with just the click of a mouse, which has led to the growth of academic dishonesty (Scanlon 2003).

In the literature review of the study, "It's Wrong, But Everybody Does it: Academic Dishonesty among High School and College Students," it is suggested that cheating has increased over the course of the past several decades. "In 1941, Drake found that 23% of college students reported cheating. Goldsen (1960) reported rates of 38% in 1952 and 49% in 1960. By the 1980s, Jendrek (1989) estimated the typical rate between 40 and 60%. By 1992, she found that 74% of college students engaged in cheating (Jendrek, 1992). Even more recently, researchers have reported rates as high as 90% (Graham, Monday, O'Brien, and Steffen, 1994). These rates pertain to college students" This study gives evidence that academic dishonesty has increased since the Internet has become mainstream and continues to become more widely used.

Here are studies and reports of academic dishonesty from 1915-2010:
http://www.cheatingculture.com/academic-dishonesty/2010/10/7/academic-dishonesty-studies-and-reports-1915-2010.html Methods of Academic Dishonesty through use of the Internet
Although it is commonly accepted that the Internet in general is an easily accessed source in which students take unfair advantage in academia, there are many different ways students obtain information on the web. In an analytical study on where students find unoriginal content on the Internet, "Plagiarism and the Web: Myths and Realities," close to 40 million college student papers were examined to obtain a glimpse into the resources students use over the Internet. These papers were submitted to Turnitin, which is the leading plagiarism prevention and wiring application for instructors. The results reveal that there were about five different resource categories that students used when it came to plagiarism, although it was reported that some were used more often than others. These five categories are as follows: Social networking and content sharing, homework and academic, news and portals, paper mill and cheat sites, encyclopedias (White Paper).

Social networking and content sharing are sites that rely on user-generate content rather than published professional content. These social networking sites include sites such as Facebook, MySpace, and question and answers on Yahoo Answers and Answers.com. The homework and academic category encompasses websites that are established to help students prepare for tests or give aid in some educational or academic aspect. Most of these sites have .org or .gov domain registrations, but also includes sites such as www.bookrags .com and www.sparknotes.com. News and portals include sites that have a traditional published model, such as the New York Times, and the Huffington Post. Sites that profit from students selling and exchanging original student papers are called paper mills or cheat sites. Lastly, encyclopedia web sites are classified into their own category because of its vast and growing popularity, including Brittanica.com and Encyclopedia.com and Wikipedia (White Paper).

The results of the study show that plagiarism is going social. One-third of all content matched in the study is from social networks or other question-and-answer sites where users contribute and share information over the web. One-quarter of all matched material is from educational web sites, which is more than double the number coming from paper mills or cheat sites. This means that educational sites are a more popular way students tend to plagiarize, although paper mills and cheat sites are the third most popular category for matched content. With 7 percent of matches, Wikipedia remains the most popular single source for student-matched content. This study also argues that educators who employ the proper tools and technologies can minimize plagiarism. The authors present this argument by giving statistics that institutions with widespread adoption of Turnitin experience a reduction in unoriginal content of 30 to 35 percent in the first year. By the fourth year, many see levels of unoriginality fall up to 70 percent. (White Paper).
Discussion:
With the increasing prevalence of the Internet and advancing technology, students have become more creative and discrete in how they go about cheating. The old standards of cheating, prior to the invention of the Internet, often involved looking over a classmates shoulder during a test, copying homework from another student, or bullying someone into writing a paper. The Internet itself has become a breeding ground for plagiarism as students often just copy and paste information and declare it as their own words and ideas. Although there are many studies and reports that have given evidence that academic dishonesty is on the rise, it cannot be fully proven. It is true, however, that the Internet has allowed for different methods of cheating that were impossible before its widespread popularity, but many people are unaware of what constitutes such cheating. It is unclear whether students have significantly dropped their old methods of cheating and replaced them with techniques involving the Internet, although it is pretty well known that both methods are still in considerable practice. With the rise of the Internet, it has also become easier for professors and educational institutions to detect academic dishonesty, such as plagiarism, from Internet sources through the use of devices that are able to detect unoriginality. It is only until recent years that universities and other academic institutions have been keeping records of academic dishonesty cases. When starting my research project I originally wanted to find out if academic dishonesty has increased at Trinity College since the 1980s, but I found that I was unable to do so. I spoke to Peter Knapp to see if there were any files on such cases in the Watkinson Library, but he told me that there was no pertinent material in the Archives. He told me that the best place for me to go would be the Dean of Students' Office for this information, but when I told Dean Reuman about my research she told me that there is only data from the last 7 years. Because of this I found it to be impossible to complete my research on this specific matter. It may be that there is a rise in concern over academic dishonesty in recent years and more honor councils are being established to punish cheating and promote academic integrity.

Here are studies and reports of academic dishonesty from 1915-2010:
http://www.cheatingculture.com/academic-dishonesty/2010/10/7/academic-dishonesty-studies-and-reports-1915-2010.html Works Cited
Rimer, Sara. 2003. "A Campus Fad That's Being Copied: Internet Plagiarism." New York Times, 3 Sept. nytimes.com/2003/09/03/education/03CHEA.html

Scanlon, PM (2003) "Student Online Plagiarism: How Do We Respond?" College Teaching, 51: 161-5. Schon, D. (1983) The Reflective Practitioner. New York: Basic Books.

Iyer R, Eastman JK (2008). The impact of unethical reasoning onacademic dishonesty: Exploring the moderating effect of social desirability. Mark. Educ. Rev., 18(2): 21-33.

Jensen, L. A., Arnett, J. J., Feldman, S. S., & Cauffman, E. (2002). It's wrong, but everybody does it: Academic dishonesty among high school and college students. Contemporary Educational Psychology, 27, 209 -28. 229 -241.

"White Paper - Plagiarism and the Web: Myths and Realities." Web. 01 May 2012. <http://pages.turnitin.com/PlagiarismandtheWebSEC.html>.

Diekhoff, George M., Emily E. LaBeff, Robert E. Clark, Larry E. Williams, Billy Francis, and Valerie J. Haines. "College Cheating: Ten Years Later." Research in Higher Education 37.4 (1996): 487-502. Print.

Maramark, S., & Maline, M. B. (1993). Issues in education: Academic dishonesty amongcollege students. Washington,DC: U.S. Department of Education, Ofﬁce of Educational Research and Improvement.

"An Ethical Dilemma: Talking About Plagiarism and Academic Integrity in the Digital Age More." An Ethical Dilemma: Talking About Plagiarism and Academic Integrity in the Digital Age (Ebony Elizabeth Thomas). Web. 04 Apr. 2012. <http://wayne.academia.edu/EbonyElizabethThomas/Papers/832016/An_Ethical_Dilemma_Talking_About_Plagiarism_and_Academic_Integrity_in_the_Digital_Age>.

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Academic Dishonesty and the Internet in Higher Education

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To most educators, the essential element to the success of their mission is academic integrity. It can be said that higher education as well as society will benefit from standards of integrity that pave the way for vibrant academic life, promote scientific progress, and prepare students for responsible citizenship.

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2.  Association of American Colleges & Universities

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2.  Association of American Colleges & Universities

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Association of American Colleges & Universities

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For the last fifteen years, I have researched questions of academic integrity. My initial interest in these questions was driven by my own experience as an undergraduate at Princeton University in the mid-1960s. Graduating from a high school where cheating was common, I was particularly intrigued by one item I received among the blizzard of forms and papers Princeton sent me as I prepared to matriculate: information about the Princeton honor code. I was informed that exams would be unproctored; that, on every exam, I would have to affirm that I had not cheated or seen anyone else cheat by signing a pledge (which I can still recite verbatim almost forty years after my graduation); and that all alleged violations of the code would be addressed by a student honor committee. Although somewhat skeptical in light of my high school experience, I headed off to Princeton confident I would do my part to uphold this seventy-year-old tradition. Apparently, the overwhelming majority of my classmates felt the same way. During my four years at Princeton, I never observed, suspected, or heard of anyone cheating, although surely there were at least some minor transgressions of the code.

When I returned to academia after more than twenty years in the corporate world, where I witnessed at firsthand the continuous erosion in the ethical values of recent college graduates, I was intrigued by the opportunity to conduct meaningful research on academic integrity. I was particularly curious to see whether campus honor codes were still a viable strategy and to explore the impact they were having on a new generation of students. While I remain a strong advocate of honor codes, my thinking about academic integrity has evolved over the last fifteen years--often in surprising ways.
The problem
In the fall of 1990, I surveyed students at thirty-one of the country's most competitive colleges and universities (McCabe and Trevino 1993). Fourteen institutions had traditional academic honor codes, and seventeen did not, having chosen instead to "control" student dishonesty through such strategies as the careful proctoring of exams. From the more than six thousand students who responded, I learned several important lessons.

The incidence of cheating was higher than I expected, and many students were quite willing to admit their transgressions. For example, 47 percent of students attending a school with no honor code reported one or more serious incidents of test or exam cheating during the past year, as did 24 percent of students at schools with honor codes. While such comparisons would seem to support the power of honor codes, it was not the code itself that was the most critical factor. Rather, the student culture that existed on campus concerning the question of academic integrity was more important. The existence of a code did not always result in lower levels of cheating. More importantly, the converse was also true: some campuses achieved high levels of integrity without an honor code. While these campuses were doing many of the same things as campuses with codes--e.g., making academic integrity a clear campus priority and placing much of the responsibility for student integrity on the students themselves--they did not use a pledge and they did not mandate unproctored exams. What was important was the culture of academic integrity to which incoming students were exposed.

Many of the students I surveyed were troubled by the failure of their institution, and often its faculty, to address the issue of cheating. Because they believed that weak institutional policies and unobservant or unconcerned faculty were "allowing" others to cheat and, thereby, to gain an unfair advantage, students viewed cheating as a way to level the playing field. This was a particular problem on large campuses and in courses with large enrollments--environments where, arguably, it is harder to establish a strong, positive community culture.

In 1993 (McCabe and Trevino 1996), I surveyed nine medium to large universities that, thirty years earlier, had participated in the landmark study of college cheating conducted by William Bowers (1964). Bowers's project surveyed over five thousand students on ninety-nine campuses across the country and provided considerable insight on how often students were cheating and why. Two outcomes of my 1993 project are particularly noteworthy in comparison to Bowers's results. First, there were substantial increases in self-reported test and exam cheating at these nine schools. For example, 39 percent of students completing the 1963 survey acknowledged one or more incidents of serious test or exam cheating; by 1993, this had grown to 64 percent. Based on student responses to the 1993 survey, however, it was difficult to tell how much of this change represented an actual increase in cheating, and how much was simply a reflection of changing student attitudes about cheating. In 1993, many students simply did not see cheating as a big deal, so it was easier to acknowledge--especially in an anonymous survey.

Second, there was no change in the incidence of serious cheating on written work; 65 percent of students in 1963 acknowledged such behavior, and 66 percent did so in 1993. However, student comments in the 1993 survey suggested that this younger generation of students was more lenient in defining what constitutes plagiarism. Although survey questions were worded to ask students about a specific behavior, without labeling it as cheating, more than a trivial number of students in 1993 said they had not engaged in a particular behavior, while providing an explanation of why the instances in which they actually had done so were not cheating. The ethics of cheating is very situational for many students.

Just as technology has enabled new forms of cheating that are becoming popular with students, that same technology has made it easier to reach large numbers of students in surveys. Since 2001, I have been conducting Web-based surveys that make it possible to reach an entire campus population with relative ease. However, many students are concerned that it is easier to identify the source of electronically submitted surveys, so they elect either not to participate or to do so while being cautious about what they say. While it is hard to get people to be honest about their dishonesty in any circumstances, it is even harder to get them to do so when they are concerned about the anonymity of their responses. This is reflected in notably lower rates of self-reported cheating in Web surveys and lower levels of participation (as low as 10-15 percent on average compared to 25-35 percent for written surveys in this project).

Nonetheless, in these Web surveys of over forty thousand undergraduates on sixty-eight campuses in the United States and Canada, conducted over the last two academic years, 21 percent of respondents have acknowledged at least one incident of serious test or exam cheating, and 51 percent have acknowledged at least one incident of serious cheating on written work. Although most had engaged in other cheating behaviors as well, four out of every five students who reported they had cheated on a written assignment acknowledged that they had engaged in some form of Internet-related cheating--either cut-and-paste plagiarism from Internet sources or submitting a paper downloaded or purchased from a term-paper mill or Web site. Although the self-reported rates of cheating found in these Web surveys are lower than in earlier surveys, they clearly are still of concern. In addition, the difference may relate more to research methodology than to any real change.
Of concern to whom?
Each campus constituency tends to shift the "blame" for cheating elsewhere. This is a major problem. Many students argue, with some justification, that campus integrity policies are ill-defined, outdated, biased against students, and rarely discussed by faculty. They also fault faculty who look the other way in the face of obvious cheating. They are even more critical of faculty who, taking "the law" into their own hands when they suspect cheating, punish students without affording them their "rights" under the campus integrity policy. Many faculty believe that these campus policies are overly bureaucratic and legalistic and that they often find "guilty" students innocent. Some faculty argue that they are paid to be teachers, not police, and that, if students have not learned the difference between right and wrong by the time they get to college, it's not their job to teach them--especially in a publish-or-perish world. Although the evidence suggests otherwise, many also believe it's too late to change student behavior at this point.

Faculty also complain about administrators who fail to support them in the face of what they perceive as obvious cases of cheating. They complain about administrators who, at least in the minds of some faculty, are more concerned with whether the student is a star athlete, the child of a major donor, or has achieved some other favored status. Of course, many administrators can detail a litany of the ways in which they think faculty shirk their responsibilities in the area of academic integrity. Still others complain that students are only concerned with grades; how they obtain those grades is less important for many.

The most appropriate response to student cheating depends in large part on the goals of the institution. If the primary goal is simply to reduce cheating, then there are a variety of strategies to consider, including increased proctoring, encouraging faculty to use multiple versions of exams and not to recycle old tests and exams, aggressively using plagiarism detection software, and employing stronger sanctions to punish offenders. But while such strategies are likely to reduce cheating, I can't imagine many people would want to learn in such an environment. As educators, we owe our students more than this, especially when cheating may reflect cynicism about what they perceive as eroding moral standards in the academy and in society.

Today's students seem to be less concerned with what administrators and/or faculty consider appropriate behavior and much more concerned with the views and behavior of their peers. Students do expect to hear the president, the provost, a dean, or some other official tell them during orientation how they are about to become academic "adults," adults who respect the learning process and who, among other things, don't cheat. And many students want to hear this message. But it's clear from student comments in my surveys that the real "proof" for students is in the behavior of their peers and the faculty. Regardless of the campus integrity policy, if students see others cheating, and faculty who fail to see it or choose to ignore it, they are likely to conclude that cheating is necessary to remain competitive. Many students ask, "if faculty members aren't concerned about cheating, why should I be?"
It takes a village
I have always been intrigued by the African tribal maxim that it takes a village to raise a child. In a similar sense, I would argue it takes the whole campus community--students, faculty, and administrators--to effectively educate a student. If our only goal is to reduce cheating, there are far simpler strategies we can employ, as I have suggested earlier. But if we have the courage to set our sights higher, and strive to achieve the goals of a liberal education, the challenge is much greater. Among other things, it is a challenge to develop students who accept responsibility for the ethical consequences of their ideas and actions. Our goal should not simply be to reduce cheating; rather, our goal should be to find innovative and creative ways to use academic integrity as a building block in our efforts to develop more responsible students and, ultimately, more responsible citizens. Our campuses must become places where the entire "village"--the community of students, faculty, and administrators--actively works together to achieve this goal. As Ernest Boyer observed almost two decades ago (Boyer 1987, 184), "integrity cannot be divided. If high standards of conduct are expected of students, colleges must have impeccable integrity themselves. Otherwise the lessons of the 'hidden curriculum' will shape the undergraduate experience. Colleges teach values to students by the standards they set for themselves."

In setting standards, faculty have a particularly important role to play; students look to them for guidance in academic matters--not just to their peers. In particular, to help students appropriately orient themselves and develop an appropriate mental framework as they try to make sense of their college experience, faculty must recognize and affirm academic integrity as a core institutional value. Without such guidance, cheating makes sense for many students as they fall back on strategies they used in high school to negotiate heavy work loads and to achieve good grades.

One of the most important ways faculty can help is by clarifying their expectations for appropriate behavior in their courses. Although faculty certainly have the primary responsibility here, they should share this responsibility with students. Not only does such "consultation" result in policies in which students feel a greater degree of ownership and responsibility, but it also helps to convince students they truly are partners in their own education. Nonetheless, faculty do have a unique and primary role to play in the classroom, and it is incumbent upon them not only to minimize opportunities to engage in academic dishonesty (even if only out of fairness to honest students) but also to respond in some way when cheating is suspected. While some may argue over the most appropriate response, it is essential that there be some response. As noted earlier, students suggest that faculty who do nothing about what appears to be obvious cheating simply invite more of the same from an ever-increasing number of students who feel they are being "cheated" by such faculty reluctance.

While faculty can do much to improve the climate of academic integrity in their campus "villages," they should not be expected to shoulder this burden alone. University administrators need to look more carefully at the role they play. The Center for Academic Integrity at Duke has encouraged, and helped, many campuses to examine their academic integrity policies, yet there are still many schools that have not reviewed their policies in decades. Instead of reacting to an increasing number of faculty complaints about Internet plagiarism by simply subscribing to a plagiarism detection service, for example, perhaps these schools should take a more comprehensive look at their integrity policies. While some may decide that plagiarism detection software is an appropriate component of their integrity policy, I trust many more will conclude that it's time to abandon their almost exclusive reliance on deterrence and punishment and to look at the issue of academic dishonesty as an educational opportunity as well.

Over the last fifteen years, I have become convinced that a primary reliance on deterrence is unreasonable and that, if we truly believe in our role as educators, we would do better to view most instances of cheating as educational opportunities. While strong sanctions clearly are appropriate for more serious forms of cheating, it's also clear that most student cheating is far less egregious. What, for example, is an appropriate sanction for a student who cuts and pastes a few sentences from a Web site on the Internet without citation? In some cases, this behavior occurs out of ignorance of the rules of citation or is motivated by a student's failure to properly budget his or her time. In a last minute effort to complete the two papers s/he has due that week, as well as study for a test on Friday, s/he panics. If the student is a first-time "offender," what's the educational value of a strong sanction?

Having decided that sanctions do little more than to permanently mar a student's record, an increasing number of schools are taking a more educational approach to academic dishonesty. They are striving to implement strategies that will help offending students understand the ethical consequences of their behavior. These strategies seem often to be win-win situations. Faculty are more willing to report suspected cheating, or to address it themselves, when they understand that educational rather than punitive sanctions are likely to result. A common choice now is to do nothing or to punish the student privately, which makes it almost impossible to identify repeat offenders. On a growing number of campuses, however, faculty are being encouraged to address issues of cheating directly with students. As long as the student acknowledges the cheating and accepts the faculty member's proposed remedy, the faculty member simply sends a notation to a designated party and never gets involved with what many consider the unnecessary bureaucracy and legalisms of campus judicial systems.

When more faculty take such actions, students who cheat sense they are more likely to be caught, and the overall level of cheating on campus is likely to decline. Administrators, especially student and judicial affairs personnel, can then devote more of their time and resources to proactive strategies. For example, several schools have developed mini-courses that are commonly part of the sanction given to first-time violators of campus integrity policies; others have devoted resources to promoting integrity on campus, rather than investing further in detection and punishment strategies. A common outcome on campuses implementing such strategies is a greater willingness on the part of faculty to report suspected cheating. They view sanctions as more reasonable, designed to change behavior in positive ways, demonstrating to students that inappropriate behavior does have ethical consequences. As students quickly learn that second offenses will be dealt with much more strongly, increased reporting also serves as an effective deterrent to continued cheating.

Of course, the most effective solution to student cheating is likely to vary from campus to campus, depending on the unique campus culture that has developed over the course of a school's history. Indeed, no campus is likely to reach the ideal state where the proactive strategies I have described are sufficient in and of themselves. Rather, some balance of punishment and proactive strategies will be optimal on each campus and, although that optimum will vary from campus to campus, punishment will always have some role. The stakes are high for most college students today, who think their entire future--their chances of gaining admission to professional school, getting job interviews with the best companies recruiting on campus, etc.--depends on a few key grades. It is, therefore, unrealistic to think that none will succumb to the temptation to cheat.

Students, even the most ethical, want to know that offenders will be punished so that other students will be deterred from engaging in similar behaviors. In fact, I am often surprised by the comments many students offer in my surveys calling for stronger punishments for students who engage in serious cheating. While they are willing to look the other way when someone engages in more trivial forms of cheating to manage a heavy workload, for example, they are far less forgiving of students who cheat in more explicit ways on major tests or assignments. The difficult task for every school is to find the appropriate balance between punishment and proactive strategies that deters students who would otherwise cheat when the opportunity arises yet that also works to build a community of trust among students and between students and faculty, a campus community that values ethical behavior and where academic integrity is the norm.

The need to achieve some balance between punishment and proactive strategies was well summarized for me this spring when I made a presentation at the Coast Guard Academy in New London, Connecticut. A second classman who was listening to my emphasis on proactive strategies suggested that, since students see so much cheating in high school and in the larger society, deterrence probably plays an important role in reducing cheating in college. In his own case, he suggested that during his first two years at the academy the biggest factor in his decision not to cheat was fear of the strong sanctions that existed and were often used. But during those two years, he was also exposed to many proactive messages about why integrity matters, especially in an occupation where the lives of so many may depend on doing one's job with integrity. He observed that he has now reached the point where he wouldn't think of cheating--no longer for fear of punishment, but because he understands the importance of integrity. However, for him, and perhaps for many other students, those strong rules helped him learn behaviors that he could later understand and value for more idealistic reasons. No campus may ever reach a truly ideal combination, but deterrence and proactive strategies both should play an important role in any academic integrity policy.
Do something
It is impossible to know whether such proposals will work on every campus. But to those campuses that have doubts about the effectiveness of such strategies, I offer the same advice I give students when they express concern about reporting peers they suspect of cheating because of the fear of reprisal or because they believe sanctions on their campus are too severe. Do something! While I'm sure there are some campuses where the modest suggestions offered here may not work as well as other possible choices, I'm even more convinced that any campus that has not reviewed its integrity policies for some time is derelict in its responsibilities to its students and likely has a degree of discontent among its faculty. Perhaps even more important, it is depriving its students of an important learning opportunity in the true liberal arts tradition.

References

Bowers, W. J. 1964. Student dishonesty and its control in college. New York: Bureau of Applied Social Research, Columbia University.

Boyer, E. L. 1987. College: The undergraduate experience in America. New York: Harper & Row.

McCabe, D. L., and L. K. Trevino. 1996. What we know about cheating in college: Longitudinal trends and recent developments. Change 28, 28-33.

----. 1993. Academic dishonesty: Honor codes and other contextual influences. Journal of Higher Education 64, 522-38.
Donald L. McCabe is professor of management and global business at Rutgers University and founding president of the Center for Academic Integrity.

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It Takes a Village: Academic Dishonesty and Educational Opportunity

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For the last fifteen years, I have researched questions of academic integrity. My initial interest in these questions was driven by my own experience as an undergraduate at Princeton University in the mid-1960s.

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Faculty Focus | Higher Ed Teaching & Learning

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Cheating continues to be a pervasive problem in college courses. Institutions have policies designed to prevent it and faculty employ a range of strategies that aim to catch those who do. And still the problem persists. A study at a university in Australia, where it is the students' responsibility to read and follow the academic integrity policy, found that only 50% of the students said they read the policy. Nonetheless, 80% rated their understanding of plagiarism 7 or above on an 11-point scale. However, when asked to identify a set of behaviors associated with academic dishonesty, their answers indicated confusion and misunderstanding of cheating, plagiarism, and other forms of collusion that occur in courses and on campus.

Could it be that in our efforts to prevent cheating we have failed to also promote academic integrity? Another study found that students understood they weren't supposed to plagiarize, but they weren't sure why. These students avoided plagiarizing so they wouldn't get in trouble with the teacher, not because they really understood what it was or why it was a problem.

I can't forget the comment of a student who compared cheating to speeding. You know you're not supposed to exceed the speed limit, but almost everybody does and most don't get caught. If lots of people do it and nobody considers it a serious offense, then our efforts to prevent cheating have failed to convey how much academic integrity matters. It's become a power issue where teachers use radar guns to catch a few cheaters with the rest proudly evading any consequences. What's been lost in the process is the recognition that it's personal integrity and the viability of the academic enterprise that's at stake here.

If we wanted to better balance efforts to prevent cheating and promote academic integrity, what could we do? We could talk more about personal integrity. Are students confronting themselves with what cheating does to them? The damage to the sense of self-worth is difficult to repair. Cheaters lie to themselves and they lie to others. By deciding to cheat, these students are telling themselves that it doesn't matter that they haven't learned or haven't done the work, and that it's OK to pretend to others that they have. And those aren't the type of actions that make a person feel proud and accomplished. Cheating may improve a grade but the costs to personal integrity are high and far-reaching. Cheating is an addictive behavior that doesn't stop with one assignments, one exam, or one course. And it doesn't end at graduation.

We could talk more about the role of academic integrity in the advance of knowledge. What if researchers cheated on their studies? Doesn't that change what we think we know ... and don't we act on what we believe to be true? Are there some examples you could use from your field? I think we may have made cheating too much of a local issue-something students should not do in courses. The reasons for academic integrity are so much larger. The implications may start with citing a source not consulted but can end with credibility compromised and sometimes careers destroyed.

Teachers need to exemplify high standards of academic integrity. Small actions can exemplify those standards. Tests, papers, and other assignments are returned when promised. Posted office hours are kept. Electronic queries are answered within a specified time period. Content details are not fudged. Mistakes are acknowledged and corrected.

I see two barriers to what I'm proposing here in terms of how we can address the imbalance between preventing cheating and promoting academic integrity. First, we need more concrete examples of things teachers can do to promote academic integrity. Second, rather than tell students that academic integrity matters, it is always more powerful if there's an activity that enables students to make that discovery for themselves. Can you help out? Are there specific activities you use, not those that prevent cheating (which, of course, we need to continue doing), but actions that demonstrate why academic integrity matters, both personally and professionally. Please share your approach.

References:
Gullifer, J. M., and Tyson, G. A., (2013). Who has read the policy on plagiarism? Unpacking students' understanding of plagiarism. Studies in Higher Education, 39 (7), 1202-1218.

Power, L. G., (2009). University students' perceptions of plagiarism. Journal of Higher Education, 80 (6), 643-662.

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Promoting Academic Integrity: Are We Doing Enough?

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Cheating continues to be a pervasive problem in college courses. Institutions have policies designed to prevent it and faculty employ a range of strategies that aim to catch those who do. And still the problem persists.

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My heart sank. Joe Hotz (not his real name) had struck me as one of the better students. The assignment had been to read James Joyce's short story "The Dead," watch John Huston's film adaptation of it and then write a one-page essay analyzing one scene. But something did not smell right. I had already graded a half-dozen short essays by Hotz, so I knew his style. This was not it. I searched for one suspicious sentence using Google, and voila! He had cribbed his report from someone else.

That was an English class. Worse, in a way, was the case of two students in a journalism ethics class who knew well the current scandals of a humiliated young trio of reporters: Janet Cooke of The Washington Post, Stephen Glass of The New Republic and Jayson Blair of The New York Times. Their careers had shattered like a dropped glass after they had faked stories. How could these students commit the very offense their course aimed to prevent?

To some, academic dishonesty, including plagiarism, is neither a crime nor a sin; it is a mistake. To me, because I see a university education as not just intellectual, but moral, it is all three. The 19- to 25-year-old conscience is still being formed. But the student who finds someone else to write his research paper today is more likely to become the driver fleeing the scene of an auto accident tomorrow than is the student who presents his true self in the classroom.

Evidence shows that academic dishonesty in its various forms is spreading like the flu. A recent New Yorker article profiled a young man who compulsively "writes"-that is, pastes together-crime novels using passages pilfered from piles of other books. To some this is merely a copyright violation that "hurts" no one-no one except the deceiver, who degrades himself and the culture he typifies, where in business and politics the contradiction between the face and the public mask do not matter as long as the charade makes money for some and amuses others.

The China Syndrome

An explosive investigation by The Chronicle of Higher Education, co-researched with The New York Times, assesses the increasing recruitment by U.S. universities, anxious to boost both diversity and income, of students from China's expanding middle class. As a result of China's one-child policy, nouveaux riche families are free to invest heavily in their one offspring's future. This can include sending him or her overseas for an American education and paying (hurrah for the university!) full tuition, whether or not the young person speaks any English or has been intellectually prepared by China's rote-memory learning system to meet American standards. Many of these students stumble through their early college years and drag down the standards in classes, as teachers limit discussion and cut down oral presentations to give the foreign students a break.

Wanting Tang, for example, described on her Facebook page as "really fun" and "really serious," was guided by an agency in Shanghai to the University of Delaware. Her family paid the agency $3,300 to prep her for the university's entrance exam and another $4,000 to write her admissions essay and put together her application. Some other agencies falsify school letterheads and create doctored transcripts and counterfeit letters of recommendation. After interviewing 250 students headed for the United States, a consulting company in Beijing concluded that 90 percent provided false recommendations and 70 percent had other people write their personal essays.

Delaware's president admits that many of the applications are false but notes that it is a problem many universities are grappling with. Interviewing applicants in China would assess their real aptitude, but that would be costly. The Chinese plagiarism phenomenon has been explained on a Georgetown University blog as the result of cultural differences, like the Chinese pressure to conform, the tendency to consider the professor a "sage on the stage" and an understanding of term papers as a copy-and-paste collection of information. American individualists, by contrast, consider academic papers to be creative research projects where "one missing reference could get someone expelled."

How Widespread?

But recent headlines demonstrate that plagiarism and its near relatives are not foreign imports. Plagiarists present themselves as people they are not: the Yale University head football coach described himself on a résumé as a candidate for a Rhodes scholarship, which he was not; the vice president of Claremont McKenna College submitted false statistics for the U.S. News and World Report rankings; a 19-year-old Long Island college student was charged with scheming to defraud, criminal impersonation and falsifying business records after he took the SAT and ACT tests for at least 15 students, charging each $3,600.

More troublesome are the academic black-or gray-sheep who by theory or practice facilitate plagiarism. In his article "Uncreative Writing," Kenneth Goldsmith of the University of Pennsylvania extols "patchwriting," a way of "weaving together various shards of other people's words into a tonally cohesive whole. It's a trick students use all the time, rephrasing, say, a Wikipedia entry into their own words." He describes a published essay strung together in this manner as "a self-reflective, demonstrative work of original genius." This is a trend among young writers, says Goldsmith; "For them the act of writing is literally moving language from one place to another."

A commentator counters that this practice is "perfectly compatible with the larger culture's recent depredations: the corporate cooking of the books at Enron, the bundling and sales of toxic mortgages by America's leading bankers, the daily misrepresentations of advertising, the stonewalling by church officials in the pedophilia scandals, the mendacity of campaign ads, etc.... reframing issues with no regards for facts or consequences."

In "The Shadow Scholar," in the Chronicle, Ed Dante (a pseudonym) confessed that he has written 5,000 pages a year of term papers that students handed to professors as their own, including 12 graduate theses of 50 pages each. His staff of 50 is overwhelmed dealing with English-as-a-second-language students who probably should not be in college and lazy rich kids who would rather buy a paper than write one.

Faculty member readers of the Chronicle blamed admissions offices for letting in weak students, grade grubbers who threaten to sue professors who mark them too low, parents who pressure faculty, students who cheat rather than work-as if faculty members had nothing to do with the students' decision to fake it. Some faculty members "solve" the plagiarism problem by not assigning papers. Dante answered: None of his clients reported that the originality of his or her work had been questioned. Not one had been caught.

George Mason University's Web site History News Network, in an article posted in 2010, summed up academic plagiarism charges against the popular American historian Stephen Ambrose. In January 2002 Fred Barnes had reported in The Weekly Standard that Ambrose's history of the Air Force, The Wild Blue, included phrases and sentences from another book without attribution. This opened a floodgate. For five months other writers scoured Ambrose's work and came up with phrases in seven of his books that had been borrowed from 12 writers. Ambrose defended his methods: He writes at his computer, surrounded by interview transcripts, documents and books, which he mixes together to describe an incident. He uses quotes to set off material from interviews, footnotes to source material in other books.

In the end, the Network judged Ambrose's offenses as misdemeanors-just sloppy accrediting, although still ethical lapses. Ambrose survived, but two problems remain. One reporter found the same manner of "mistakes" in Ambrose's 1963 University of Wisconsin doctoral thesis. A more thorough faculty mentor at the beginning of his career might have helped spare him his later embarrassment.

Plagiarism's End

Why cheat? Cultural forces promote it. A university must ask itself to what degree it is willing to distinguish its code of behavior from that of the larger society. Is education moral or merely money-centered? The underlying reason students like Hotz cheat is that they have not committed themselves to the level of work they are obliged to do in college. They do not see study as a priority. When study interferes with their real priorities-football practice, frat or sorority life, an off-campus job, romantic interest or just hanging out-they calculate that they can con their professors and get away with it.

They may be right until they run up against a professor who cares about the quality of their work. Modern professors can be firewalls against plagiarism if they assign readings by the best stylists-Thoreau, Orwell, E. B. White, Joan Didion, Rebecca West, James Baldwin, Virginia Woolf-so students get a feeling for great writing as something to be imitated, not abused; assign a short written reflection (or more) each week to get a sense of each student's style; assign major paper topics inspired by the course, so the student is familiar with some sources; require that half the sources be from printed sources, not material snipped from the Web or Wikipedia; meet personally with the student a week before the paper is due for a progress report, including three pages of a rough draft and discussion of two of the library books; and explain the purpose of documentation, that the reader must be given access to the writer's sources.

Uncovering plagiarism demands effort. Google any suspicious phrases or use the Internet-based service called Turnitin, which will reprint papers with every purloined passage in a separate color. Return papers in class and read aloud, without naming the author, an offending passage, followed by the same passage from its original source. It is another way of saying, You will be caught.

The sanction for plagiarism must be at least an F on the paper, accompanied by a letter in the student's file to be consulted if it happens again, with the understanding that a second offense would mean expulsion. This policy will be effective only with leadership from the president and full cooperation from the faculty. If, however, some faculty respond to the plagiarism plague by not assigning papers or by misguided mercy, the problem will continue. As one of my students said recently, "You plagiarize because you don't value what you are doing. And if the teacher doesn't expect much of you, you'll cheat."

About 40 years ago, I published an article on Norman Mailer in Commonweal. A few years later I saw an ad in a journal for a collection of essays on Mailer and ordered the book. It turned out to be a self-published collection of student seminar papers. The professor had made publication part of the syllabus. And there was my article with a student's name on it.

I was not angry, but sad. Why had this professor allowed this young man to hurt himself in this way? Did the student do it again? Where is he today?

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The Plagiarism Plague: Declining standards make getting caught the primary offense

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My heart sank. Joe Hotz (not his real name) had struck me as one of the better students. The assignment had been to read James Joyce's short story "The Dead," watch John Huston's film adaptation of it and then write a one-page essay analyzing one scene. But something did not smell right.

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Advice

William Brown for The Chronicle

We know that students plagiarize. We suppose that plagiarism, as well as academic dishonesty in general, has increased over the past few years, decades, or century-depending on which academic ax we choose to grind.

The caveats are familiar: Perhaps cheating just is easier than it used to be (most honors students who are caught plagiarizing say they did so because it was "easy"). Perhaps we are better at detecting plagiarism because of software such as Google and Turnitin. Or perhaps we forget that every generation, at least since the ancient Romans and Greeks, complains that the next one is composed of lazy, possibly illiterate, youngsters willing to cut ethical corners.

But a good dose of skepticism toward the doomsayers doesn't make the worry go away. For example, a July 21 article in The Chronicle on a New York University professor who vowed to stop pursuing plagiarists has drawn 249 comments, several of which were impassioned denunciations of institutional responses to the problem. Dealing with student plagiarism is a nagging, seemingly endless problem for academics, judging from the number of articles, blog posts, and forum discussions on the topic. Indeed, I've contributed to some of those discussions but have yet to find any consensus emerge.

I've organized and participated in conference panels on plagiarism, held workshops for college instructors and schoolteachers on the subject, and for several years have used the methods I'm about to describe. I also began my teaching career with a zero-tolerance policy, which meant that I have been involved in campus judicial proceedings, a step that drains just about everyone touched by the accusation.

But as the Internet has matured, I decided that I did not want to spend time as a cyber-cop. More important, my goal should be to help inculcate honor and integrity rather than build a culture of fear and accusation.

It's easy to find excellent articles and Web sites on dealing with plagiarism. From those sources, we can develop four general guidelines for an effective response:

The solution should be positive; that is, show students how to act as responsible scholars and writers. The same tone should be reflected in the syllabus. I have seen many syllabi in which the penalties for plagiarism are laid out in excruciating detail, with no positive models or behavior mentioned. Surely by now we know that positive motivation trumps the negative variety.

It should help students avoid plagiarism rather than focus on our catching it.

The solution should objectively strengthen both students and teachers.

It should also make students and teachers feel as though they are stronger.

Those seem to me to be minimal requirements, yet they often are not met in practice. Before laying out a workable solution, let's review some approaches whose weaknesses contribute to the seemingly endless discussions of plagiarism.

Draconian consequences. The instructor who threatens maximum damage if plagiarism is detected usually stakes out the moral high ground. Syllabi and accompanying class discussions list everything that will befall the student, including possible expulsion.

Strength: If applied consistently, without regard for extenuating circumstances, this approach seems to work particularly well for teachers who are both imperious and admired by their students. I knew one colleague, a tenured professor of literature and writing, who threatened to ruin, as nearly as possible, the reputations of offending students. Somehow he still inspired them.

Weakness: Instructors who use this tactic set an adversarial tone at the beginning of a course. Although some can inhabit the Professor Kingsfield character from The Paper Chase, many simply come off as nasty or suspicious. And approaching plagiarism this way is dispiriting-it never energizes students or teachers. In the end, it often doesn't prevent enough plagiarism to counter its weaknesses.

Preventive construction. A teacher who is concerned about plagiarism and has read about strategies may attempt to construct every assignment in a way that precludes plagiarism.

Strength: Rethinking assignments-freshening them up-often produces new energy in a course. Those who reflect often on pedagogy will be attracted to this approach.

Weakness: The approach often means devising assignments with a narrow scope. But it's important to train students to explore widely. They need to be able to sift through all sorts of sources, and closely tailored assignments may be too restrictive. Such assignments certainly don't simulate the strengths needed in graduate or professional school. And sooner or later, we either will run out of ideas for assignments or will be lulled into a false sense of security.

Dedicated discussion. Some teachers discuss extensively in class the nature and consequences of plagiarism, believing that such time is well spent.

Strength: Some students may not understand what constitutes plagiarism or its consequences. By discussing it carefully in class, instructors demonstrate an awareness of that problem.

Weakness: Merely talking with students, especially about a critical topic, is a poor way to ensure that they will act correctly. Giving quizzes on the topic is a move in the right direction. But a quiz still encourages passivity. Plagiarism and academic dishonesty are actions taken by people; powerful lessons about it require actions as well.

A workable solution. The first writing assignment I give students in my writing courses involves plagiarism as a topic. I ask them to investigate and read resources on the Web assembled by experts on the subject such as Nick Carbone, a new-media consultant for Bedford/St. Martin's, and Bruce Leland, a professor emeritus at Western Illinois University. I ask students to take notes on the readings, especially on how both authors are unhappy with standard approaches to preventing plagiarism and academic dishonesty. I tell them to pay special attention to Carbone's discussion of Dos and don'ts, a list he developed after deciding that his previous approaches to fighting plagiarism adopted an inappropriate tone, and to Leland's extensive list of resources that instructors can use to deal with plagiarism.

Then I ask students to find a Web site that offers free essays for download. I provide a central source, such as "Cheating 101: Internet Paper Mills," available at www.coastal.edu/library/presentations/mills2.html, though there are many others. Each student has to download one paper (or as much of one as is permitted by the site) and analyze its strengths and weaknesses. They must bring to class a copy of the paper as well as their notes on their reading, and deliver oral reports.

The idea is for students to read materials written by teachers for teachers, rather than something written just for students. The explicit lesson is for them to learn about plagiarism and academic dishonesty. An implicit lesson is that instructors already are aware of free papers and other Internet dodges. Even if you, as a faculty member, are not particularly computer-savvy, students will assume from this assignment that you understand how to track down plagiarism.

By analyzing these "free essays" before the class, students learn firsthand that the papers available over the Internet often are far inferior to what they could produce on their own. When they occasionally happen on a strong paper, they will remark that it is too good: No professor would believe that such a professionally written piece had come from a student for a course assignment.

You need not guide the students' choices of papers: Their own interests and majors will do that. Through this assignment, they are engaging in research from the first day of the course, and are practicing critical reading. They understand that you will treat them like adults, since you have assigned them to read authoritative, friendly articles from Web sites that speak to adult professionals. And other than require that they concentrate on a paper's strengths and weaknesses, you need not guide the analyses: Students of all writing levels will demonstrate that they can pick apart someone else's work.

You can substitute other Web sites or articles, of course. But you should give students separate credit for their Web-site notes and for their critique of the downloaded paper-both of which should be physical copies. Students who took notes can be distinguished easily from those who did not, which allows you to teach the lesson that strong scholars or professionals take notes. The physical copies also allow you to collect the assignments if you run short on time for the oral reports, though I encourage you to allow everyone to present.

This assignment builds: (1) a direct awareness of plagiarism and its responses; (2) research skills, since students immediately follow and analyze reliable Web sources; and (3) presentation skills, all without creating a hostile or adversarial atmosphere. The assignment can be adapted for large (or online) courses by creating a blog or online discussion area, although nothing beats the in-person connection. (I also ask students to introduce themselves by name every time they present. My philosophy is to maximize what any assignment can achieve.)

I have employed this approach with undergraduate and graduate, traditional and nontraditional students. During the past two semesters, I used it in online classes to great effect. Any method that makes both students and professors feel strong is worth trying.

Jeff Karon is a visiting instructor in the English department at the University of South Florida.

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Advice We know that students plagiarize. We suppose that plagiarism, as well as academic dishonesty in general, has increased over the past few years, decades, or century-depending on which academic ax we choose to grind. The caveats are familiar: Perhaps cheating just is easier than it used to be (most honors students who are caught plagiarizing say they did so because it was "easy").