It seems like cheating has become a bit of problem around University of Wisconsin — and Bo Ryan has nothing to do with it this time.

The Dean of Students Academic Integrity report for 2014-15 was recently released, and 148 students were reported to the Dean of Students Office for academic misconduct last school year.

While cheating is never actually as cool as it sounds, only having 148 students caught for academic misconduct isn’t too terrible considering the amount of students on this campus.

But the real issue at hand, according to some administrators, is the fact many of these incidents often go unreported because professors have discretionary privileges when it comes to reporting academic misconduct.

Currently, incidences only have to be officially reported if the student’s grade will be affected, or if the professor is looking for a formal reprimand.

Whether it be sneaking a cheat sheet into an exam or going as far as to destroy someone else’s work to boost the curve, academic misconduct comes in many different forms. Along with that, it’s not hard to see that within every category of misconduct, there are undoubtedly going to be varying levels of severity.

Someone could just forget to include one source in the references section of their 20-page research paper while their buddy could have put the assignment off until the night before it was due just to eventually copy and paste the entire thing from a Wikipedia page, and both cases would be considered plagiarism.

It might be a bit extreme, but either way, that example shows there can be obvious differences between two incidences of academic misconduct that may fall under the same classification. Taking this into consideration, it’s pretty understandable if a professor decides one specific instance might not be worth the trouble of reporting to the Dean of Students Office.

In all honesty, I don’t really see an issue with professors being able to run their own classes, even when it comes to dealing with academic misconduct. They have a closer relationship with the students than the Dean of Students Office, and it’s the rest of the students in the class who are most affected by the incident. The professor should know best what kind of punishment fits the crime.

Along with that, there are at times some discrepancies between the students’ and the professor’s definition of academic misconduct. This can also lead to the professor not reporting an incident because the professor feels the student doesn’t deserve any real punishment because they didn’t know they were breaking the professor’s policy.

So yes, allowing professors to do their thing without the Dean of Students Office micromanaging probably won’t result in an accurate count of the number of academic misconduct incidents that took place over the year.

If gaining an accurate number is such a big deal to the administration then, first off, instructors should have to clearly define their idea of academic misconduct in the syllabus of every class. I mean, the syllabus pretty much wields as much authority as the Constitution for each course, so having something a little more descriptive than “cheating is bad” shouldn’t be too ridiculous to expect.

In regard to actually reporting incidents, just force professors to report every incident of academic misconduct to the Dean of Students Office, even if it’s large or small.

On the other side of that, the administration should streamline the handling of cases with minimal severity to something as simple as marking a tally in the academic misconduct column for the year so there’s not too much micromanagement and the process isn’t too much of a hassle.

Nobody likes a cheater, and it shouldn’t be too difficult to hold wrongdoers officially responsible through reporting incidents to the Dean of Students Office.

Phil Michaelson ([email protected]) is a sophomore majoring in biomedical engineering.