Student Government has ideas to stop cheating at Eastern after attending the Conference of Academic Integrity at the University of Virginia.

The conference drew mostly Midwest and East Coast schools including Stanford University, the University of California at Los Angeles and Rice University, said Amanda Sartore, chair of the Student Senate Academic Affairs committee.

Sartore said the forum presented how the schools handle academic integrity, offering suggestions such as modified honor codes and online solutions to plagiarism.

“It was basically about trying to apply honor codes to your school,” said Ronnie Deedrick, student vice president for academic affairs, who also attended the conference.

Deedrick said most issues from the conference will not be implemented until the spring semester or fall 2003.

“Even redoing our student conduct code is something that’s going to take time,” he said.

The only change Student Government will make is to reshape the campus academic integrity posters to be more visually appealing.

Sartore said the posters are displayed in most Eastern classrooms now, but they do not attract attention or illustrate the punishments for cheating.

“I want one with bright red lettering that says ‘don’t cheat,’ and this is what’s going to happen to you if you do,” she said.

She said many schools offered options to catch students who cheat, and their punishments vary as much as the options.

“(At) Some of these universities you can get expelled for cheating, but not for raping somebody,” she said.

She said University of Virginia has an honor code that will allow students to take unproctored exams outside of a classroom setting, but Eastern is not set up to implement such a code.

“They have an honor code; they will not cheat. Since it’s been there so long you go into the university knowing that’s going to be expected of you,” she said. “I don’t think our campus is set up like that.”

Eastern Michigan University uses a Web site at http://www.turnitin.com that allows instructors to submit students’ class papers to a Web site database full of other academic papers from different universities.

The Web site then rates the papers compared to other papers in the database for similarities, tipping teachers off to plagiarism.

Sartore said the service is controversial, since the papers remain in the database, even though the papers are submitted anonymously.

“Once you submit the paper it does become property of turnitin.com,” she said.