Research on Academic Dishonesty

Academic researchers have devoted considerable time and effort in recent years to exploring several important dimensions of academic dishonesty. Here are some of the highlights of what they have learned:

Incidence and types of cheating and academic dishonesty

• Cheating in high schools has increased. About 3/4 of students admit to cheating on an exam within the last year according to research by the Josephson Institute in 2002.
• Research on college students by Rutgers Professor Donald McCabe and others indicate that more than 3/4 admit to some cheating, including 1/3 who admit to serious cheating on tests and 1/2 who admit to serious cheating on written assignments.
• Internet “cut and paste” plagiarism has grown dramatically according to research by McCabe and others. The rate at which college students self-report engaging in such activity rose from 10% in 1999 to more than 40% in 2001; moreover, at that time, 68% of students reported that they did not believe that internet cut and paste was not a serious issue.

Student rationales for academic dishonesty. According to research by Ball State Professor and others, student rationales vary:

Motives

• Performance concerns: fear of failing course, flunking out of school, failing to graduate; desire for better grade
• External pressures:
  • academic (heavy workload, others cheat and don’t want disadvantage, professor didn’t explain material, too many tests at the time)
  • non-academic (parental pressure, outside work leaves too little time, illness, financial need necessitates strong grades, desire for strong grades to get into graduate or professional school)
• Professor: perceived as demanding unfair work load, giving unfair tests, grading unfairly
• Lack of effort: did not attend class or did not want to do the work
• Loyalties to others: was helping a friend or was loyal to a group (e.g. fraternity)
• Opportunism: irresistible opportunity arose unexpectedly
• Gamesmanship: challenging to cheat

Reasons

• Perception that will get away with it: people aren’t caught, people aren’t punished
• Opportunism: others don’t cover their papers, professor left the room

Justifications

• No harm, no foul: cheating has no victims or is only wrong sometimes
• Not my responsibility: I was sick, professor doesn’t care
• Special situation: I’m moral most of the time, but in this instance…
• Minimizing: It wasn’t a big deal, it was only a quiz
• Necessity: I had to do it or I wouldn’t get a job, etc.
• General norms: Everyone cheats to get ahead; no one worries about that

Bernard E. Whitley, Jr. & Patricia Keith-Spiegel, Academic Dishonesty: An Educator’s Guide (Lawrence Erlbaum Assoc., 2002) at 23-24.

Characteristics of undergraduate students who tend to cheat. Reviews of numerous studies by Whitley and others indicate that the following sorts of students are at least moderately more likely to cheat than their peers. (Whitley & Keith-Speigel at 30-31):

• Business majors and others with career plans relating to business
• Engineering majors
• Fraternity and sorority members
• Younger students
• Students with lower grade point averages
• Male students appear to cheat more than female students
• Students involved in extracurricular activities (including sports) cheat more than those who are not
• Students for whom English is a second language who have been raised in non-Western cultures may also have difficulty in conforming to plagiarism policies when they still find difficulties with writing in English

Characteristics of graduate students who tend to cheat. There is limited research on patterns involving graduate students who cheat, although some research has specifically focused on graduate students in medicine, business, and certain other disciplines. A recent study provides some important insight, however. Valerie A. Wajda-Johnston, Paul J. Handal, Peter A. Brawer, & Anthony N. Fabricatore, Academic Dishonesty at the Graduate Level, Ethics & Behavior, 11(3), 287-305 (2001):

• More than 1/4 of surveyed graduate students reported they had cheated in graduate school with greater levels reporting such conduct as occurring in their early years.
• When probed about specific dishonest acts, with particular definitions provided, the proportion reporting such conduct was closer to 3/4.
• Just over 1/2 of faculty members reported that they were a good deal or greatly concerned about academic honesty, while slightly less than half said they would realistically confront a cheater. About 1/3 of faculty address academic dishonesty on their syllabus, or the first day of class, and about 1/4 do so on exam days.

Contexts in which academic dishonesty is most likely to occur

• Where cheating is a campus norm and an accepted part of the culture
• Where the school has no honor code
• Where faculty understanding and support of academic integrity policies is low
• Where there is little chance of getting caught
• Where penalties for cheating are not severe

Donald L. McCabe, Linda Klebe Trevino, Kenneth D. Butterfield, Cheating in Academic Institutions: A Decade of Research, Ethics & Behavior, 11(3), 219-232 (2001).

Differences in faculty and student perceptions about academic dishonesty. It is especially striking that faculty and students have substantially different perceptions of the seriousness of various types of academic misconduct.

As reported by Whitley & Keith-Speigel (at 37-40), substantial disparities in judgment exist as to the following types of conduct. For purposes of the listed rating, “5” means that 90% or more of respondents believed the conduct to be dishonest, “4” meant that 27-89% believed it to be dishonest, “3” meant that 50-75% believed it to be dishonest, “2” meant that 25-49% believed it to be dishonest, and “1” meant that fewer than 25% believed it to be dishonest.

The mismatch of faculty and student perceptions are particularly notable in the following areas, according to ongoing work by Donald McCabe:

• Internet cut and paste plagiarism: about 85% of faculty regard such behavior as “moderate or serious cheating” but about 50% of students regard it that way
• Unauthorized collaboration: about 85% of faculty regard such activity as “moderate or serious cheating,” but only about 35% of students regard it that way

Faculty responses to academic dishonesty

• 37% of faculty in the United States report that they have ignored cheating “on occasion”
• 69% of faulty in the United States have never reported cheating