It used to be that if a student at Simon Fraser University felt the call of nature while writing an exam, he or she was excused, then escorted to the washroom by a teacher.

Then staff discovered that nature had little to do with it.

Students were hiding cheat sheets in washroom stalls.

“They were secreting things in them,” said Rob Gordon, director of SFU’s criminology department, “wrapping their cheat sheets in plastic bags and putting them in the toilet tanks. And, of course, teachers couldn’t follow them into a stall.”

It called for countermeasures, and they appear to have worked: Cheating is well down from its heyday.

“Those washrooms,” Gordon said, “are pre-screened now before exams.”

It is the struggle as old as school itself — desperate students cheating on exams and essays, and their teachers trying to catch them at it. Gordon, who chairs SFU’s senate committee on academic integrity in student learning and evaluation, has seen it all.

In a technological update of the cheat note hidden in the palm of the hand, Gordon said, they’ve caught students hiding iPhones up their sleeves, and then, with their cheat notes written on the iPhone’s Notebook setting, sliding them down into their hands as needed. In response, the school banned all cellphones and Internet-capable devices in exam halls.

Students have been caught taking clear plastic water bottles into exams, but only after removing the original label and replacing it with a false label with cheat notes written on the back. Water bottles must now be kept underneath desks.

Some teachers have asked students to remove baseball caps while writing exams after finding students had written cheat notes on the underside of their caps’ visors. “If they keep looking up,” Gordon said, “we figure something is going on.”

And then there was the case of cheat notes discovered written on the waistline of a student’s underwear, which occasioned the student to perform self-wedgies to bring the cheat notes into view. It ultimately gave the student away. Underwear has not yet been banned from exams.

Cheating was such a problem at SFU that the school felt it had to re-examine the issue. Several high-profile incidents in the last decade surfaced in the news. In one case, 44 business and economic students were caught plagiarizing projects. In another, two students submitted identical English essays. The students had used a tutor, who had mailed the identical essays to their professor.

The SFU administration established an investigative group, and its recommendations were passed on to Gordon’s committee. After more than three years of deliberation, the school came up with a new student code of conduct.

One of the changes has been in the marking system: Students can now receive an FD — Failed for Academic Dishonesty. The FD is not only stigmatizing, it can affect a student’s effort to find work after graduation, when employers often ask for transcripts. It stays on the student’s record for two years, then reverts to an F if, Gordon said, “the student has conducted themselves appropriately.”

Students can also be expelled and their degrees rescinded, though those cases, Gordon said, are rare and usually for repeat offenders. Last year, only four students received suspensions.

“Everybody gets one nibble at the [forbidden] fruit,” Gordon said.

The school takes a “softer approach” to cheating than outright expulsion, he said. The committee found that many students caught cheating were simply not prepared for university, that they had come out of high school not knowing how to do research, write essays or, in some cases, how to read and write proficiently in English.

Rather than suspension in such cases, Gordon said, the school decided to provide remedial measures for students, including a new “student learning commons,” where they can learn study techniques or be referred to, as Gordon put it, “ethical tutors” who will help students study but stop short of writing or editing their papers for them.

At the University of B.C., expulsion is also rare, and used in only the most serious cases, but suspension for cheating is still common. For more than a decade, UBC has even published an annual report detailing each case of student discipline, in part as a reminder to students how severe penalties can be.

In the 2007-08 report, released this week, there were 60 disciplinary cases, for everything from plagiarizing essays to a male student entering a women’s washroom and taking pictures of a female student showering. (He was suspended for two years.)

Only one student was expelled permanently, and not for cheating, but for “e-mailing two separate threats to the university that caused major disruptions to campus including the closure of one building.” (The case also resulted in criminal charges.)

Penalties for cheating, said Hubert Lai, UBC’s legal counsel, usually result in suspensions that typically last eight to 10 months, which is enough to disrupt a student’s entire academic year.

“The university takes a very tough-minded approach to these cases,” Lai said. “For the last couple of years, we had 128 cases . . . and all but 11 cases ended in suspension.”

Cases of cheating, he said, are well down from a few years ago, when plagiarizing from the Internet was popular. Computer programs that screen for Internet material and professors’ growing familiarity with Internet-based research, Lai said, has helped reduce much of it.

In every case, Lai said, a grade of zero is entered for the course and a notation of academic misconduct is entered into the student’s transcripts. It is those notations that often have a more serious effect on a student’s future than a suspension, and can affect, say, a student’s attempt to get into graduate school.

Even so, most of the students return to UBC after a suspension. It’s preferable, Lai said, to the finality of outright expulsion.

“There’s no point in throwing them to the curbside,” he said, “just because they made a mistake.”

(www.eduwo.com, Jainlyn&Charlotte)