Students Reported for Cheating Explain What They Think Would Have Stopped Them

I analyzed 298 open-ended responses of undergraduate students who have been reported for cheating to the question, “What, if anything, would have stopped you from committing your act of academic dishonesty?” These responses included a few major themes: students pled ignorance of what constitutes academic dishonesty and the consequences/seriousness associated with violations; students tended to deflect blame, usually by saying that their professor could have done something differently (neutralization); students did not feel they had enough time, resources, and/or skills to get the desired result without taking responsibility for this lack of time, resources, and/or skills (strain); students felt they did not manage their time well with accepting the blame for the poor time management; and that a bad grade was not an option. These data and results are discussed in relation to the extant literature on the topic.     

The Role of Goal Orientations in Explaining Academic Cheating in Students With Learning Disabilities: An Application of the Cusp Catastrophe

The purpose of the present study was to predict and explain the academic cheating behaviors of elementary school students with learning disabilities (LD) by applying the cusp catastrophe model. Participants were 32 students with identified LD from state governmental agencies although all both them and the typical students participated in the experimental manipulation (N = 480). Academic cheating was assessed using an empirical paradigm where true achievement was subtracted from achievement in a test without proper invigilation. Data analysis supported the proposed cusp catastrophe models, where mastery-related motives acted as asymmetry and performance goals as bifurcation variables respectively. These findings were confirmed with application of the interactive goal hypothesis (Barron & Harackiewicz, 2001), where the interactive approach and avoidance performance goal term functioned as a splitting factor in the relationship between adaptive motivation and performance.     

THE FORUM

Internet plagiarism continues unabated and may even be increasing. Questions pertaining to the ethical-moral construct employed by students to justify Internet plagiarism among high school students have remained relatively untouched. Understanding not simply the prevalence of Internet plagiarism but also the variety of explanations used by students to justify their plagiarism seems crucial to curtailing its practice. In this study, I surveyed 160 high school students and endeavored to understand and describe the practices of students who use the Internet for schoolwork and who engage in copy-paste plagiarism or paper-buying practices. The results indicate that students are more easily able to justify copy-paste plagiarism for a variety of reasons that mirror justifications of other forms of conventional plagiarism. Most students indicated they would never purchase a paper for reasons ranging from fear of getting caught to more principled and nuanced ethical claims. Based on these results I also offer educators suggestions for refining assignments and evaluation methods.     

The Theory of Planned Behavior as a Model of Academic Dishonesty in Engineering and Humanities Undergraduates

This study examines the use of a modified form of the theory of planned behavior in understanding the decisions of undergraduate students in engineering and humanities to engage in cheating. We surveyed 527 randomly selected students from three academic institutions. Results supported the use of the model in predicting ethical decision-making regarding cheating. In particular, the model demonstrated how certain variables (gender, discipline, high school cheating, education level, international student status, participation in Greek organizations or other clubs) and moral constructs related to intention to cheat, attitudes toward cheating, perceptions of norms with respect to cheating, and ultimately cheating behaviors. Further the relative importance of the theory of planned behavior constructs was consistent regardless of context, whereas the contributions of variables included in the study that were outside the theory varied by context. Of particular note were findings suggesting that the extent of cheating in high school was a strong predictor of cheating in college and that engineering students reported cheating more frequently than students in the humanities, even when controlling for the number of opportunities to do so.     

Study of a Cognitive Dissonance Intervention to Address High School Students' Cheating Attitudes and Behaviors

This study examined academic dishonesty (AD) of 586 Taiwanese graduate students, the relationship between students' AD and their perceptions of AD of their peers, and their judgments regarding the seriousness of AD. Results showed that female students were more critical of AD than their male counterparts were in the areas of fraudulence, plagiarism, and falsification. Male students demonstrated more awareness of peer involvement in AD in the area of falsification than did female students. Master's students confessed to greater involvement in AD compared with the PhD students. Doctoral students were more judgmental with respect to unethical acts of fraudulence, plagiarism, and falsification.     

Threats to Moral Identity: Testing the Effects of Incentives and Consequences of One's Actions on Moral Cleansing

Individuals engage in moral cleansing, a compensatory process to reaffirm one's moral identity, when one's moral self-concept is threatened. However, too much moral cleansing can license individuals to engage in future unethical acts. This study examined the effects of incentives and consequences of one's actions on cheating behavior and moral cleansing. Results found that incentives and consequences interacted such that unethical thoughts were especially threatening, resulting in more moral cleansing, when large incentives to cheat were present and cheating explicitly harmed others. Implications are discussed in terms of ethics training, using incentives as motivators, and the depersonalized norms of science.     

Imitation Is the Sincerest Form of Cheating: The Influence of Direct Knowledge and Attitudes on Academic Dishonesty

What effect does witnessing other students cheat have on one's own cheating behavior? What roles do moral attitudes and neutralizing attitudes (justifications for behavior) play when deciding to cheat? The present research proposes a model of academic dishonesty which takes into account each of these variables. Findings from experimental (vignette) and survey methods determined that seeing others cheat increases cheating behavior by causing students to judge the behavior less morally reprehensible, not by making rationalization easier. Witnessing cheating also has unique effects, controlling for other variables.     

An Examination of Academic Misconduct Intentions and the Ineffectiveness of Syllabus Statements

This experiment uses quantitative and qualitative measures to address the effect of two syllabus statements on academic misconduct: one based on prohibitions and one on academic integrity. Students expressed favorable attitudes toward the statements, showed an increase in guilt compared to a control group, but showed no decrease in intentions to cheat. Including only a standard academic misconduct statement in one's syllabus is not sufficient to alter behavior, which should be acknowledged by faculty.     

The “Epidemic” of Cheating Depends on Its Definition: A Critique of Inferring the Moral Quality of “Cheating in Any Form”

The incidence and moral implications of cheating depend on how it is defined and measured. Research that defines and operationalizes cheating as an inventory of acts, that is, “cheating in any form,” has often fueled concern that cheating is reaching “epidemic proportions.” Such inventory measures appear, however, to conflate moral and administrative conceptions of the problem. Inasmuch as the immorality of behavior is a function of moral judgment, academic misconduct is immoral only when it is intentional, and the greatest moral weight should be ascribed to violations that students judge to be the most “serious.”