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Harvard: Dozens disciplined over exam cheating


    BOSTON (AP) _ Harvard University said Friday it issued academic sanctions against about 60 students who were forced to withdraw from school for a period of time in a cheating scandal that involved the final exam in a class on Congress, drawing criticism from a high-profile alumnus.

   The school implicated as many as 125 students in the scandal when officials first addressed the issue last year.

   The inquiry started after a teaching assistant in a spring semester undergraduate-level government class detected problems in the take-home test, including that students may have shared answers.

   In a campus-wide email Friday, Faculty of Arts and Sciences Dean Michael D. Smith said the school's academic integrity board had resolved all the cases related to the cheating probe.

   He said ``somewhat more than half'' of the cases involved students who had to withdraw from the college for a period of time.

   Harvard said that the length of a student's withdrawal period is usually from two to four terms.

   Of the cases left, about half the students got disciplinary probation. The rest weren't disciplined.

   Some athletes became ensnared, including two basketball team co-captains whom the school scratched from its team roster in the wake of the cheating investigation.

   Past reports in The Harvard Crimson also linked football, baseball and hockey players to the scandal.

   Smith's said in Friday's email that the school wouldn't discuss specific student cases. A school spokesman, citing student privacy, also wouldn't say if any athletes had withdrawn or say which teams might have been affected.

   The dean said a school committee is working on recommendations to strengthen a culture of academic honesty and promote ethics in scholarship.

   ``This is a time for communal reflection and action,'' he wrote. ``We are responsible for creating the community in which our students study and we all thrive as scholars.''

   Staples founder Thomas Stemberg, a Harvard graduate whose son is a student, on Friday criticized the school's handling of the probe.

   ``If you challenge the entire faculty at the Harvard Business School and the Harvard Law School to come up with a process that took more time, cost more money, embarrassed more innocent students, and vindicated guilty faculty ... that could not have outdone the process that took place,'' he said.

   Stemberg, a supporter of Harvard's basketball team, knows some of the students caught up in the scandal and his son knows others.

   He wrote a complaint letter to Harvard's president in early January claiming that the professor who taught the government class changed the rules after several exams in which ``open collaboration'' was encouraged.

   He alleged that for the take-home exam in question, instructions to students said they couldn't collaborate with professors, teaching fellows ``and others.''

   ``If the message was so clearly expressed, why did some of the teaching fellows go over the exam in open session ... If they did not get the message, could one expect the students to understand it?''

   Stemberg went on to say that while some students ``went too far, literally cutting and pasting their answers,'' others only wrote answers from notes ``derived in the collaborative atmosphere the class encouraged.''

   The class was known as ``Introduction to Congress,'' and widely seen on campus as an easy way to get a good grade.

   Harvard Undergraduate Council President Tara Raghuveer said Friday that the cheating investigation has been a hot topic on campus for months. She said some students started the new school year without knowing if they'd be allowed to finish it because of the lengthy period of time the probe took.

   The 20-year-old junior also said there are a lot of questions about whether the take-home exam's instructions were clear enough when it came to expectations about group work. She said both students and professors are being careful to discuss collaboration policies now.

   Raghuveer also said the school community should make an effort to embrace the students who withdrew for disciplinary reasons when they come back to campus.

   ``The students who are implicated in this scandal from last spring still need to be recognized as members of our community ... They shouldn't feel alienated from Harvard,'' she said. ``This was an unfortunate incident. Students are being punished accordingly.''

 <한글기사> 

명문 하버드대 부정행위 스캔들 파장
 
미국명문 하버드대학교 재학생 60여명이 의회에 관한 수업의 기말고사에서 부정행위를 했다는 스캔들에 연루되어 일정 기간의 정학 제재를 받았다고 학교 측은 1일 밝혔다.
대학 측은 지난해 사건을 처음 조사할 때, 125명이나 되는 학생들이 스캔들에 연루된 것으로 판단했었다. 스캔들 관련 조사는, 한 학부과정의 정부관련 봄학기 수업에서 한 조교가 문제점을 발견한 후에 착수되었다.

예술과학학부 마이클 스미스 학장은 하버드대학 학업윤리위원회에서 부정행위 조사와 관련된 모든 사건들을 해결했다고 대학 내에 전파된 이메일에서 밝혔다. 
두 명의 농구팀 공동 주장을 포함한 몇 명의 선수들이 스캔들에 연루되었었다. 하버드 크림슨의 과거 보고들은 축구, 야구 그리고 하키 선수들이 부정행위 스캔들에 연관이 있다고 지적한 바 있다. 스미스 학장은 금요일 이메일에서 특정 학생의 사례를 밝힐 수는 없다고 말했다. 한 대학 측 대변인은 학생의 사생활 보호를 이유로 어떤 선수가 정학조치를 당했는지 밝힐 수 없다고 말했다.
 
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