Higher Ed | Daily Report

When it comes to college transcripts, an F is an F, right? That might not be the case for long at Cal Poly San Luis Obispo.

Flickr photo by Casey Serin

A committee of the university's Academic Senate is drafting a policy that would allow the university to put a special notation on a student's transcript to indicate when an F is for cheating, rather than for honest-to-goodness failure, the Mustang Daily reported. The potential policy shift is part of a growing push among universities to toughen up their response to academic dishonesty.

Under current policy, Cal Poly students who are caught cheating multiple times and are put on probation or kicked out of school as a result get a transcript notation. It says the student was put on probation or went through a judiciary process due to academic dishonesty, said Kevin Lertwachara, an associate professor in the Orfalea College of Business and chair of the Academic Senate's instruction committee.

Some faculty members say they want more stringent consequences for cheaters. The new policy under discussion would add more details to the transcript. Each F a student got for cheating would come with a note indicating the grade was the result of dishonesty, Lertwachara said. A future employer could glance at a student's transcript and see, for example, that a student cheated in calculus, Shakespeare or both.

First-time offenders would have a chance to redeem themselves. They'd get a transcript notation for their first cheating-related F, but the notation would be removed after a quarter if the student completed required training. Some faculty members think the new approach would show the university is taking cheating seriously while also encouraging students to learn proper citation methods.

But Tarek Halteh, an economics sophomore, told the Mustang Daily he thinks an F is adequate punishment for cheating.

“I don’t feel it is necessary for a student to carry that stigma on and on,” Halteh said. “If someone cheats, he receives an ‘F,’ and that is consequence enough.”

David Conn, associate vice president for inclusive excellence and director of the Ombuds services, is drafting the policy and the instruction committee plans to review it in the fall, Lertwachara said.

What Cal Poly is considering isn't altogether new. A number of universities around the country and abroad have created an actual separate grade for failure by cheating. The University of Maryland at College Park was among the first to employ the mother of all F's, the "XF." Students can petition to change an XF to an F if they last a year without cheating and complete a course in academic integrity.

Over at top-ranked Simon Fraser University on Burnaby Mountain in Canada, they call the cheating F the "FD." It's only for the egregious cheaters and it only stays on the transcript for two years.

Cal Poly can't implement an "FX" or "FD" grade because those types of changes would have to be approved on a systemwide level, Lertwachara said.

It's unclear whether there's any data on the success these measures have had in reducing incidents of cheating, in part, because reporting by faculty is uneven, he said.

And how many employers actually look at prospective employees' transcripts? A 2008 report commissioned by the Association of American Colleges and Universities indicated that fewer than three in 10 employers found transcripts useful in evaluating job candidates.