School of Dentistry punishes cheaters

The IU School of Dentistry has disciplined nearly half of its second-year class for cheating, said the school’s dean, Dr. Lawrence Goldblatt.\nOut of 95 students in the class, nine have been dismissed from the school, 16 have been suspended for various lengths of time and 21 have received letters of reprimand.\nThe alleged cheating came to the school’s attention in February when a student reported that several others in one class had gained unauthorized access to test materials, said Diane Brown, Assistant Media Relations Director for IU-Purdue University Indianapolis.\nFor the class, students received password protected e-mails containing photos of mouths or radiographs for use with test questions. Students received the password to open the images at the start of the test, but some students opened the images earlier using commercial password cracking software, Goldblatt said.\nOthers correctly guessed passwords from past semesters. \nWhen the student came forward, officials interviewed all students in the class. Officials announced their findings Friday.\nIt appears as if several different groups of students worked independently to crack the images, rather than in one large group, Goldblatt said.\nIt is a common practice in the IU School of Dentistry to e-mail the images before an exam to avoid technical difficulties with Web sites or projectors on test day.\n“The method of encryption has been changed so that now those images will be extremely difficult to open,” Goldblatt said.\nStudents were punished based on their level of involvement in the cheating. Some students were found to have cheated only once, while others cheated on multiples exams. The students who received letters of reprimand were found to have violated the school’s code of conduct by having knowledge of the cheating and not reporting it.\nThose found to have cheated have received failing grades in the class. All the students have until Friday to appeal the decisions.\n“I would be naïve to think cheating has never occurred here before, but nothing of this magnitude has ever occurred before,” Goldblatt said.\nThere is no evidence of such cheating in past classes, he added.\nSuch cheating is not without precedent at other dental schools, however. Last year the University of Medicine and Dentistry at New Jersey found that 18 students out of a graduating class of 84 had been involved in a cheating scheme.\nTen students were also suspended from the University of Nevada at Las Vegas’ School of Dentistry last year for using a faculty member’s password to verify they had performed clinical rounds they had not.\n“Students, faculty, staff and others are very disappointed this happened,” Goldblatt said. “We wish everyone the best, but these folks made a very serious error that has cost them our trust.”