Harvard University suspends 60 students for cheating
About 60 students of the
prestigious Harvard University, USA, have been suspended and others
disciplined in a mass cheating scandal at the elite college, the
administration said at the weekend.
Faculty of Arts and Sciences dean,
Michael Smith, told staff and students at the university near Boston
that “somewhat more than half” of the cases under investigation ended
with students being required “to withdraw from the college for a period
of time.
“Of the remaining cases, roughly half
the students received disciplinary probation, while the balance ended in
no disciplinary action,” Smith said in a campus-wide email.
When the scandal first became public in
August, Harvard said that as many as 125 students were suspected of
helping each other in a final exam.
The university said a large number of
undergraduates “may have inappropriately collaborated on answers, or
plagiarised classmates’ responses, on the final exam for the course.”
Harvard, located in Cambridge,
Massachusetts, is one of the most exclusive universities in the world,
with students paying about $63,000 (about N10 million) a year to attend
after winning a place in a highly competitive admissions’ process.
Smith called the scale of the cheating
incident “unprecedented” and said reforms were being drawn up to
“promote academic integrity and a deeper understanding of it within our
community.”
“We all can do better,” he said in the email.
