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WESTERN UNIVERSITY • CANADA’S ONLY DAILY STUDENT NEWSPAPER • FOUNDED 1906
THURSDAY, MARCH 26, 2015
TOMORROW high -2 low -7 VOLUME 108, ISSUE 93
No increase in cheating, Western says Brittany Hambleton GAZETTE STAFF @uwogazette
Kelly Samuel • GAZETTE
New highrise condo coming to downtown London Jane Meng GAZETTE STAFF @uwogazette
A 25-storey residential and commercial tower may soon be overlooking Victoria Park in downtown London. This is in addition to a 21-storey third tower joining two existing ones in Old East Village. According to Western, however, due to expense and distance from campus, students may not be flocking to the development anytime soon. Glen Matthews, housing mediation officer for Western’s Division of Housing and Ancillary Services, said the majority of students at Western are choosing to live closer to campus instead of downtown London. “We track the trend of where off-campus students are living every four years. The last time we did it was 2012, and data shows that
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proximity to campus is a priority for students,” says Matthews. “As for the type of housing, it really depends on which year the students are in; many second years choose to live in a house because they have a large group to live with,” adds Matthews. “As they go into third or fourth year, living group tends to become smaller, and more of them are choosing to live in apartments.” Medallion Corporation, however, is confident their new project will have no problems renting spaces in the new tower. “We are very confident that we will be all leased-up by the time the third tower is ready to go,” George Espinola, director of residential property management at Medallion Corporation, said. Espinola said with the future downtown expansion of Fanshawe College, possible tenants could be the school’s students, although they currently aren’t the building development’s target market. “As of right now, the plan is same as the other two towers, we are targeting the general public,” Espinola added. “The apartments are mainly for white, blue, and grey collar individuals and for young couples as well.” Medallion Corporation estimated the new apartment tower, along with the two existing apartments, would drive up the area’s population by 2,000 residents.
While the project seems likely to get the green light from the city, the public has expressed some concerns. “In terms of concerns, it is mostly coming from the general public,” London city planner Mike Corby said. “Many concerns revolve around the intensity of the living
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LTHOUGH IT IS A MORE EXPENSIVE CHOICE AND IT IS FURTHER AWAY FROM CAMPUS, IT MAY STILL APPEAL TO SOME STUDENTS BECAUSE IT IS BRAND NEW. GLEN MATTHEWS
HOUSING MEDIATION OFFICER FOR WESTERN’S DIVISION OF HOUSING AND ANCILLARY SERVICES
area and the population growth, as well as the garbage and the noise level.” The building of this new project, with all aspects ready to go, is only missing city hall’s cue of approval. “Although it is a more expensive choice and it is further away from campus, it may still appeal to some students because it is brand new,” said Matthews.
In a follow-up study of an academic misconduct survey, researchers believe that the instances of cheating among university students has likely increased over the past 10 years. After a study was conducted in 2002–03 on cheating at 11 Canadian universities, researchers are preparing to release results of another survey conducted in 2012–14. The new survey involves 10 universities and a large sample size of students who self-reported about whether they cheated, what type of cheating they used and how serious they considered the cheating. Julia Christensen Hughes, one of the researchers, explained that the increased use of the Internet has been a driving force behind increased cheating attempts. “Because of the Internet, there are growing opportunities for students to access papers written by other students and access case studies that have already been analyzed — even the teaching notes,” said Hughes in an interview with University Affairs. Despite these findings, Western’s vice-provost academic programs and students, John Doerksen, has not seen a significant increase in the number of reported cases of cheating at Western over the past several years. The most common forms of cheating that come across Doerksen’s desk are plagiarism, which includes students turning in work that was not their own or that was improperly cited, and attempts to cheat on exams. “Some cases are black and white,” Doerksen said. “I think if you cheat on an exam and you know you’re looking over somebody’s shoulder ... or whatever means that you cheat on exams ... that’s clear, both to the professor and the students, so I think we can set that part aside.” Doerksen explained that an area students need to learn more about is the practice of citing other people’s work. This will vary by discipline and the expectation of proper citation will increase over
the course of a student’s time at Western. “In first year a student might not be as familiar with exactly how you cite and what all needs to be cited in written work,” he said. “By the time you’re in fourth year or you’re in grad school, the expectation is going to be quite high.” There are some measures put in place to help Western professors prevent cheating. Many students are familiar with the website turnitin.com. Once a paper has been uploaded, the site will detect how similar the submitted paper is to other published works as well as other students’ assignments. It is still up to the faculty member, however, to decide whether or not any cheating has occurred. A software that provides an analysis of answers and patterns of answers is also often used on multiple choice exams as a method that can point to cheating if it is there. Doerksen argues that finding ways to detect cheating is not the most important or effective way of dealing with the problem. The more important question is how can each faculty structures assessment techniques in such a way that cheating is not seen as an appropriate or beneficial way forward. “Perhaps there’s an opportunity for a number of different kinds of work,” Doerksen said. “Instead of having everything just on a final exam or on two exams there’s going to be more presentations or group work … that put the focus on learning rather than strictly on marks.” He explained that in general students put a lot of emphasis on marks because it is seen as a way of moving forward. Cheating allows the student to appear to do well in the degree program and to be competitive in grad school, but in the end, he said, they only end up cheating themselves. “There isn’t a shortcut to learning,” Doerksen emphasized. “I think that it’s really important for students to understand what you get in a university and in a learning environment like this is the opportunity to expand your knowledge to expand your skillset, and that’s the primary benefit of going to a university.”