Cheating in College

By Scott Jaschik
Inside Higher Ed
Originally published on September 27, 2012


A scandal at Harvard University has many educators talking about cheating and whether anything can be done about it. Experts say that many students arrive in college already skilled at and not morally troubled by cheating, and scandals at top high schools back up this point of view. What, if anything, can professors and colleges? These issues are explored in a new book, Cheating at College: Why Students Do It and What Educators Can Do About It (Johns Hopkins University Press). The authors are Donald L. McCabe, professor of management and global business at the Rutgers University Business School; Kenneth D. Butterfield, associate professor of management, information systems and entrepreneurship at Washington State University; and Linda K. Treviño, professor of organizational behavior at Pennsylvania State University. They responded via e-mail to questions about the book.

Q: Is cheating getting worse? Or do those who say that only imagine a golden age when academic honesty prevailed?

A: Interestingly, the hard data we present in our book suggest cheating may now be on the decline. Similar results have been obtained by the Josephson Institute in their work with high schools. After a period of steep increases, some moderation in cheating was reported in their 2010 report. They will issue a new report in October 2012 and it will be most interesting to see what’s happening now. But, it is important to keep in mind that the data are self-reported and, in our studies, we have moved from print surveys to online surveys. That move may have affected the numbers we are seeing, possibly making the picture look rosier than it really is.

In our college work, we have observed a kind of ebb and flow in our data – some types of cheating seem to have increased (surprisingly not necessarily those related to the Internet) and others seem to be on the wane. However, there seems to be little question, based on various comments offered by students, that changes in student attitudes can’t be ignored. Many students have indicated that they have had no involvement in certain types of cheating, but in open-ended questions near the end of our survey, they say that they actually have engaged in these actions, but when they did it, it was not cheating because…. Of course, this may simply be a rationalization process so students don’t have to admit, maybe even to themselves, that they’ve actually cheated.

The entire story is here.

Studies Find More Students Cheating, With High Achievers No Exception

By Richard Perez-Pena
The New York Times
Originally published September 7, 2012

Large-scale cheating has been uncovered over the last year at some of the nation’s most competitive schools, like Stuyvesant High School in Manhattan, the Air Force Academy and, most recently, Harvard.

Studies of student behavior and attitudes show that a majority of students violate standards of academic integrity to some degree, and that high achievers are just as likely to do it as others. Moreover, there is evidence that the problem has worsened over the last few decades.

Experts say the reasons are relatively simple: Cheating has become easier and more widely tolerated, and both schools and parents have failed to give students strong, repetitive messages about what is allowed and what is prohibited.

“I don’t think there’s any question that students have become more competitive, under more pressure, and, as a result, tend to excuse more from themselves and other students, and that’s abetted by the adults around them,” said Donald L. McCabe, a professor at the Rutgers University Business School, and a leading researcher on cheating.

The entire story is here.

Dishonorable Conduct?

By Allie Grasgreen
Inside Higher Ed
Originally published September 6, 2012

Officials at Harvard University were quick to condemn the behavior of the 125 students suspected of collaborating inappropriately on a take-home exam.

“These allegations, if proven, represent totally unacceptable behavior that betrays the trust upon which intellectual inquiry at Harvard depends,” Harvard President Drew Faust said in a statement.

Harvard officials, who declined to comment for this story, say they plan to revisit their academic integrity policies and possibly create an honor code. It’s not the first time they’ve raised the idea – for at least two years now, administrators have recognized the potential need for a makeover. In 2010, undergraduate dean Jay Harris told The Harvard Crimson that academic dishonesty there was “a real problem.”

Harvard's official handbook says students should “assume that collaboration in the completion of assignments is prohibited unless explicitly permitted by the instructor.” And the university apparently created a voluntary academic integrity pledge students could sign last year, the Globe reported, but scrapped it this year.

The entire story is here.

Harvard accuses 125 students of cheating

By Mary Carmichael
Boston.com
Originally published August 31, 2012

Harvard University is investigating 125 students accused of collaborating on a spring take-home final exam, in what could prove to be the largest Ivy League cheating scandal in recent memory.

Nearly half the students in an introductory government class are suspected of jointly coming up with answers or copying off one another. Groups of students appear to have worked together on responses to short questions and an essay assignment, violating a no-collaboration policy that was printed on the exam itself, said Jay Harris, Harvard’s dean of undergraduate education.

Although no students appear to have lifted text from outside sources, some apparently plagiarized their classmates’ work, submitting answers that were either identical or “too close for comfort,” Harris said Thursday.

A teaching fellow noticed the similarities in May while grading a subset of the exams. He alerted the professor, who approached the college’s Administrative Board, the body that oversees student behavior. The board was worried enough to spend the summer interviewing some of the students and reviewing every exam in the class.

The students whose tests were flagged as problematic — nearly 2 percent of the college’s approximately 6,700 undergraduates — have been notified and will appear before the board individually in the next few weeks, Harris said. Some may be exonerated, but those found guilty could face a range of punishments up to yearlong suspensions.

The entire story is here.

An Academic Ghostwriter, the 'Shadow Scholar,' Comes Clean

By Dan Berrett

The Chronicle of Higher Education

Originally published on August 21, 2012

When The Chronicle published a confessional essay two years ago by a writer for a student-paper mill who had spent nearly a decade helping college students cheat on their assignments, it provoked anger, astonishment, and weary resignation.

The writer, under the pseudonym Ed Dante, said he had completed scores of papers for students who were too lazy or simply unprepared for their work at the undergraduate, master's, and doctoral levels.

The academic ghostwriter has retired, and in his new memoir, he reveals his true identity: Dave Tomar, 32, a graduate of the bachelor's program in communications at Rutgers University's New Brunswick campus and, now, a freelance writer in Philadelphia.

In The Shadow Scholar: How I Made a Living Helping College Kids Cheat, which is due out next month from Bloomsbury, Mr. Tomar seeks to cast himself as a millennial antihero while scolding colleges for placing the pursuit of money and status above student learning.

The entire article is here.

Why (Almost) All of Us Cheat and Steal

Behavioral economist Dan Ariely talks about why everyone's willing to cheat a little, why you'll steal a staple from work but not petty cash and whether punishments for cheating actually work

By Gary Belsky

Time Magazine - Business

Originally published June 18, 2012

Behavioral economist Dan Ariely, who teaches at Duke University, is known as one of the most original designers of experiments in social science. Not surprisingly, the best-selling author’s creativity is evident throughout his latest book, The (Honest) Truth About Dishonesty. A lively tour through the impulses that cause many of us to cheat, the book offers especially keen insights into the ways in which we cut corners while still thinking of ourselves as moral people. Here, in Ariely’s own words, are seven lessons you didn’t learn in school about dishonesty. (Interview edited and condensed by Gary Belsky.)

1. Most of us are 98-percenters.

“A student told me a story about a locksmith he met when he locked himself out of the house. This student was amazed at how easily the locksmith picked his lock, but the locksmith explained that locks were really there to keep honest people from stealing. His view was that 1% of people would never steal, another 1% would always try to steal, and the rest of us are honest as long as we’re not easily tempted. Locks remove temptation for most people. And that’s good, because in our research over many years, we’ve found that everybody has the capacity to be dishonest and almost everybody is at some point or another.”

The entire story is here.

Who Cheats, and How

By Allie Grasgreen

Inside HigherEd

Eighty-four percent of students at a public research university believe students who cheat should be punished, yet two of every three admit to having cheated themselves. Most of the cheating students admit to involves homework, not tests, and they see academic misconduct applying differently to those two kinds of work.

These findings were part of a study presented here this week at the annual convention of NASPA: Student Affairs Professionals in Higher Education. Depending on how much you buy into the “Dirty Rotten Scoundrels” theory – the idea, for which this session was named, that faculty believe students are “just a bunch of cheaters” – the findings may or may not come as a surprise. But either way, those results, coupled with the fact that many instructors devote little if any time to discussing academic integrity, led the researchers to an obvious conclusion: setting clear expectations, and repeating them early and often, is crucial.

“It’s about communicating clearly in the classroom and spending time on the topic,” said Angela Baldasare, divisional manager of assessment and data analysis at the University of Arizona, about clarifying expectations and increasing the intrinsic values of assignments, “so that there’s something more to it than just a grade.”

The study into the frequency and type of offenses, and the faculty policies and responses, surveyed more than 2,000 students and 600 instructors on the Arizona campus.

It found the highest rates of cheating among fraternity and sorority members and international students, the latter of whom were most likely to use technology to cheat. Fewer than 10 percent of Arizona students said they’ve used technology to get answers during an exam, but more international than American students admitted to obtaining test answers online (21 versus 11 percent), having copied material from the Internet for a writing assignment without citing the source (23 versus 13 percent), and sending or receiving text messages during an exam (12 versus 3 percent). Cheating was reported least among students receiving need-based aid, and non-degree seeking and first-generation students. (The more education a student’s parents had, the more likely he or she was to have cheated.)

Freshmen were least likely to have cheated, and the likelihood that students had cheated rose from year to year at an almost linear, small but significant rate. (Interestingly, under most circumstances, the opposite was true when students were asked how likely they think they would be to cheat in the future.)

The entire story is here.