Honor Code Academic Abstract Case Number Unknown
Susie was taking a 300-level Economics class. One assignment for the class was a take-home midterm that had to be returned to the Professor’s office at a given time, but that in case she was not there, to make a copy of the exam and slide the original under her door.
When the exams were due, Linda, who was also in Professor Barnum’s econ class, stopped by the office to return the midterm. Professor Barnum was not there, and Linda who was in a rush to get to her next class, did not have the time to make a photocopy of the exam. As she was leaving the office, she met Susie. Linda told Susie that Professor Barnum was not in her office. Susie said that she had a few errands to run and did not want to photocopy her exam and she said that she would stop by the office late to turn in the exam. At this point, Linda asked Susie if she could turn in her exam for her when she turned in her own exam. Susie agreed to do so and left to run her errands.
Susie later returned to Professor Barnum’s office and returned both exams. Professor Barnum recalls that she did not think it was anything out of the ordinary at all that Susie had returned both of the exams and did not remember this until she began grading the midterms. According to Professor Barnum, she did not notice the similarities between the two exams until she came to a question at the end of the exam.
She had checked Linda’s exam first, and found that Linda had made a very strange mistake that she had never encountered before. After checking several other exams, she began checking Susie’s exam. It was near the end of Susie’s exam that she notices the same mistake that she had noticed earlier in Linda’s exam. She then went through all the questions, comparing both exams. She noticed that Susie had made the same mistakes that Linda had, and the language in the answers was almost identical in many instances. She said that she noticed how Linda’s answers were integrated in Susie’s answers. In most questions, Susie started her answer in one way and then included sentences that were identical or strikingly similar to Linda’s answers. In a few answers, the shift in the direction of the answers was very abrupt and almost contradicting. Professor Barnum also noticed that Susie’s exam papers looked like the original answers had been erased.
In her statement, as well as during the hearing, Susie maintained that she had not looked at, nor copied, any of Linda’s answers. She claimed that she had turned in both exams to Professor Barnum after running her errands without taking a look at Linda’s exam. Professor Barnum believed that he similarities in the two exams were too striking to be a coincidence. She proposed that Susie receive a zero on the test, but be allowed to continue in the course. Her reason for wanting Susie to be able to continue in the course was that since Susie had no way of knowing that Linda was going to ask her to turn in her exam for her, her actions were clearly unplanned.
The Honor Board decided that there was not sufficient evidence to determine Susie’s guilt or innocence. Therefore, it was decided that she would take a new midterm under proctored conditions.
