Fifty-five Coast Guard Academy cadets in New London, Connecticut, were caught cheating on homework assignments.
In the largest cheating scandal in the Coast Guard Academy’s history, 20% of the class of 2025 were caught sharing homework answers with one another and were also aided by an older student from the prior year.
“And in another instance a cadet who had taken the homework assignments and done poorly on them and gone and talked to the instructor and gotten the right answer, distributed those answers,” said Commander Aaron Casavant, the Assistant Commandant of Cadets. “There were networks of cheating.”
It comes at a time when the Coast Guard service is already under scrutiny for a report that former Coast Guard leadership withheld from Congress and the publicsexual abuse and misconduct at the Academy over several years.
Whether the cadets understand how their actions affect the current image of the Coast Guard, Casavant said he’d like to think so, but he’s not sure. Twenty-five cadets have asked to appeal their sanctions Casavant said, knowing it could affect the start of their careers.
Casavant said they found out about the cheating incidents when the class instructors reviewed the computer program used to administer the homework assignments. They found two issues.
“What we found was that the homework assignments were being completed in the order of seconds and minutes, rather than the amount of time that the instructors expected a homework of that complication and difficulty to take,” he said.
Casavant said the cadets used a variety of electronic means to disseminate and share homework information from text messaging to the use of social media.
He said this wasn’t the type of behavior he’d expect from these cadets, who are expected to graduate in 2025 after completing their four years of training at the Academy.
“It is your responsibility to know and understand the collaboration policy,” Casavant said. “We are training you to be members of the Coast Guard who can be trusted to, in ambiguous situations, either clarify the guidance or otherwise seek instruction and not take the easy, lazy, careless, opportunistic way out.”
Despite each cadet admitting their wrongdoing they have the right to appeal any discipline or sanctions they receive under the Coast Guards Penal Code.
Casavant was the one who decided on how each cadet would be disciplined based on their specific involvement but also decided on some shared sanctions as a group, including losing their class presidency, assignment to battalion staff, and the coveted Master at Arms positions.
“One of the shared punishments was the loss of your leadership position by virtue of your actions. In this case, you have lost the special trust and confidence that the command has in you,” Casavant said.
As a group, all 55 cadets have to undergo a 20-week honor remediation course to remind them of the core values of the Coast Guard, as well as a six-month suitability for service probation, which Casavant said looks more carefully to determine whether a cadet is suitable for continued service in the Coast Guard.
“It's simply a recognition that your actions in a training environment were just that choices and actions in a training environment were not a zero-defect organization,” he said.
“And in this case, I think that every one of those 55 deserves the opportunity to demonstrate to me, my successor and the Coast Guard Academy's chain of command that they successfully got the message,” Casavant said. “They can rehabilitate and change their behavior and then move forward into what I think will otherwise be successful careers.”
