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.