 Academia has its own little f-word that seems to stir up a lot of negative feelings among students and professors alike. Fraud. It causes students to feel like inevitable offenders and professors to feel like police officers trying to protect the integrity of their exams. So I think it's time to have a conversation about fraud and why we need a collective culture to discourage it. Before we talk about fraud, we first have to agree upon what a university is. A basic definition of a university would be an institution of higher education and research. It curates and generates new knowledge through research, and disseminates that knowledge through teaching. Seems simple enough, but let me ask you a question then. Who is the customer of a university education? A common viewpoint of students is understandably quite student-centric. The students are the customer of a university education. This viewpoint is somewhat understandable. Students do pay tuition to attend a university. Universities in turn spend money to hire professors and construct other teaching infrastructure. These resources are then used to impart knowledge to students so they can earn a diploma and get a good job at the end of their studies. This seems reasonable enough, but there are some dangers in this incomplete picture. One danger is that students can perceive their professors as working directly for them and a university degree as something they are buying. I can tell you I've had my fair share of students angrily confront me after failing an exam, stating that they pay my salary so I should have prepared them better for an exam or made it easier for them. Another danger is that this view isolates the consequences of a student's actions, as the whole process is simply a transaction between a student and the university. Now how does this relate to the discussion of fraud? If a student sees a university only in this manner, it is easy to deceive themselves that they deserve a diploma simply by paying tuition and attending university. An alternative and more constructive view of university education is society-centric. Society has a whole desires engineering solutions. Just take a quick look around your surroundings now and you will see numerous examples of engineered products that are improving the quality of your life by solving a particular societal need or challenge. But all of these solutions have the potential to be very dangerous and even deadly if they are done incorrectly. So society invests in and entrusts universities to ensure that there is a pool of trustworthy and competent engineers. So in this view, a university works for society, their graduates are the product, and the diploma is a certification that communicates that the holder has sufficient knowledge, professionalism and integrity to safely solve societal challenges. My bet is that students who are driven to commit fraud fail to see their academic career and their diploma in this context. Otherwise, it would require some pretty narcissistic tendencies to be okay with receiving a certification for your professionalism and integrity through such means. That being said, universities cannot afford to be naive with respect to fraud, so they have to consider the possibility that fraud can occur and do their best to prevent it, which brings us to the consequences of fraud. What happens if one student commits fraud? They may actually feel it's worth the risk. If they're found out, the professor will simply give them a zero on something they expected they were going to fail anyways. And if they are not found out, they may pass something they expected to fail. The reality is a bit different. The penalties for committing fraud can be severe and even result in being expelled from a degree program altogether. So the notion that professors will simply assign a zero to the course or assignment is not true. In fact, in most universities, the professor does not get to decide the consequences for cases of fraud. They simply get to report suspected cases of fraud to an independent panel of academics who then review the evidence for the suspicion and make a judgment on it. In my institution, this panel is referred to as the Board of Examiners. But in other institutions, it may have another name. The notion that one is safe if their fraudulent behavior is not immediately discovered is also not true. You may actually be surprised to learn that unlike criminal acts, there is no statute of limitations on breaches of academic integrity. This means that a case of fraudulent behavior can be brought forward long after the act has been committed and be evaluated in terms of its impact on that social contract between society and the university. One only needs to do a simple search on the internet for examples of instances where universities have revoked an awarded degree based upon evidence of plagiarism or other forms of academic fraud that were detected long after they occurred. In some cases, even decades afterwards. So what happens when a large number of students commit fraud? What are the consequences in such a case? This is where things can get a bit tricky and seem unfair at an individual student level. For the sake of discussion, let's talk about this in the context of a final exam for a course. Imagine a professor discovers several cases of fraud in their final exam and reports these to the Board of Examiners. These cases can be dealt with on an individual basis as discussed previously. But there exists a sort of critical mass in terms of the number of cases of detected fraud in which the integrity of the exam as a whole can be called into question. This places the professor and the university in a tricky situation. If they allow the results of the exam to stand, ignoring that the integrity of it was threatened and there's a high probability that many other undetected cases have occurred, then they themselves are committing fraud. They would be violating their social contract with society. If this is in turn discovered, it can have a snowball effect, similar to when a police officer or other professional bound by a social contract to society is found to have committed fraud. Everything else they have been involved in becomes subject to critical review and distrust. So if your professor informs you that the results of an exam can be invalidated if widespread fraud is detected, even if you are not one of the perpetrators of that fraud, you need to understand that this is actually an action done in your best interest. I can agree that it seems unfair that the actions of others causes you to lose a result you feel you earned fairly. But if the results are allowed to stand and the issue with the exam comes to light at some point in the future, remembering that there is no statute of limitations on academic fraud, it would be far worse for your diploma to be invalidated or lose all of its value as a professional credential. This is why universities take academic fraud so seriously. The consequences can be quite significant and affect far more than the individual perpetrators. But the responsibility is not only that of the university. Students should have a vested interest in protecting the integrity of the degree that they are trying to earn themselves. This is why I'm particularly bothered when I hear remarks from students stating things such as, if the means to commit fraud are easy, then it should be expected that students will take advantage of them. That sort of attitude and the behavior it embodies is completely counter to what a professional degree represents. Just think about that sort of attitude being an applied in a profession earned with such a degree. This possibility concerns me a lot. In fact, as part of my research portfolio, I analyze a lot of aircraft accidents and failures. I truly fear the possibility of coming across a case in the future where the failure could be attributed to negligence or unprofessional behavior on the part of an engineer that I myself had a part in educating and certifying. This is why I take the issue of fraud so seriously. And my hope is that after watching this video, you see the collective need for students and staff alike to ensure fraud does not threaten the integrity of what a university diploma stands for.