Article: Engineering Students’ Perceptions of and Attitudes Towards Cheating
Unfortunately, there is little doubt that academic dishonesty is prevalent in colleges and universities with upwards of 80% of undergraduate students reporting they have cheated at least once during their college careers. It is also well documented that the percentage of undergraduates who self-report cheating differs by college major with engineering students reporting some of the highest rates of cheating in college over the past forty years. The implications of academic dishonesty are myriad – it affects the integrity of the learning process, an individual’s long-term behavior, and the ability of academic institutions to achieve their stated objectives. In addition, students who cheat are likely to develop attitudes and habits that can interfere with their learning, and may ultimately become practicing engineers who are insufficiently prepared. Finally, research has also shown that students who cheat in college are more likely to engage in other deviant behaviors such as cheating on taxes and behaving unethically at work.
The authors believe that understanding cheating and its implications for engineering education can be organized around three key research questions: what is student cheating and how often does it occur; why do students cheat; and what methods can be used to reduce or stop cheating? Students’ perceptions and attitudes on these questions are the basis around which this manuscript is organized. Though a student’s behavior in a given situation is likely influenced by a complex interaction of a variety of factors, this research followed the lead of others in studying three types of factors (psychological, demographic, and situational) that have been identified as playing a role in student decision-making. As such, the survey was developed based on published literature and included questions in all three categories to analyze the role of each for engineering undergraduates. The team also supplemented literature based survey questions with questions based on our own thoughts about why students cheated. Finally, the survey investigated student definitions of cheating across contexts, the frequency of engagement of cheating behaviors, and student demographics.
With respect to administration protocol, surveys were provided to specific faculty who volunteered to administer them during a class period. It should be noted that institutions and individual classrooms were selected based on the willingness of a faculty member to distribute the surveys in a course. The protocol used to administer the surveys was designed to protect the all participants and alleviate concerns of being singled out for past indiscretions. It was similar to the procedure used at many institutions to administer end-of-term instructor evaluations. Prior to administering the survey, the instructor briefly read a written script about the nature of the research and the students’ rights including anonymity and voluntary participation. The instructor then left the room while students completed the survey. Students were asked to fill out the survey and place the completed surveys in one large plain envelope when finished. The envelope was sealed and returned to a department administrative assistant, who in turn mailed it to one of the authors of this manuscript for inclusion in the data set. The survey was printed in a format that is easy to scan so that results could be processed automatically and data analysis could be conducted using statistical software.
The most significant finding in this study is that students were willing to engage in behaviors that they acknowledged were wrong and that they perceived to carry risks of punishment. In fact, if behaviors identified as wrong by a majority of respondents are analyzed in the aggregate, more than 96% of respondents in this study reported performing at least one act of cheating. Further, the frequency with which students reported cheating was found to be dependent on their attitude toward the behavior. Specifically, students who believed an act was unethical, but not necessarily cheating were more likely to engage in the act than were students who believed the behavior to be cheating and unethical. This distinction that students make between what is and what is not cheating is clearly at odds with the viewpoints of most faculty and administrators. Together, these findings provide insight into students’ definition about what is or is not morally wrong and their commitment to act morally “right”. Thus, educators need to be concerned that within the context of academic work, students may have rather misguided moral principles. We contend that it is the educational system itself, and not some nebulous societal failure, that is at the root of the problem.
As a final observation, this research also suggested that students were more commonly able to rationalize cheating behavior using instructor-based neutralizations such as “the instructor did an inadequate job” or “the instructor assigned too much material” than using neutralizations based on course material. This correlates well with students’ belief that it is primarily the instructors’ or the institution’s responsibility to limit cheating and not the students’. This is a significant finding because it indicates that an individual instructor can minimize cheating in their class. As such, practical pedagogical methods to help students avoid the pressure of cheating need to be identified and widely disseminated.
Overall, the authors believe that the responsibility for promoting academic integrity lies with the entire college community, including students, administration, and faculty. The institution’s policy of academic integrity must be publicized and modeled by the administration and communicated clearly to the students via faculty in the classroom environment. However, to truly implement effective techniques for reducing academic dishonesty, a better understanding of the student decision-making process is necessary. Consequently, our current and future research direction involves two primary objectives. The first is to develop and validate a predictive model of a student’s decision to cheat or not to cheat and the second involves using the model to develop and disseminate practical pedagogical techniques for reducing academic dishonesty. While developing a predictive model, the research team discovered that the focus of most research on academic dishonesty (particularly institutional research) is on quantifying the magnitude of the problem and measuring student attitudes toward the behavior. What is lacking is research that investigates the decision-making processes of individual engineering students prior to performing an act of cheating. The predictive model developed by the team is based primarily on Ajzen’s Theory of Planned Behavior.
Acknowledgements
The University of Michigan College of Engineering and the Educational Research Methods Division of the American Society of Engineering Education provided the financial support to conduct the PACES-1 Survey. The authors would also like to thank the Kern Family Foundation and the Templeton Foundation (through the Center for Academic Integrity) for supporting their ongoing research efforts.
Author 1: Donald D. Carpenter [email protected]
Author 2: Trevor S. Harding [email protected]
Author 3: Cynthia J. Finelli [email protected]
Author 4: Susan M. Montgomery [email protected]
Author 5: Honor J. Passow [email protected]
Article Link: http://www.asee.org