Cheating Lessons by James Lang
In anonymous surveys, up to three-quarters of university students confess that they have engaged in academic dishonesty at least once during their undergraduate careers. Academic dishonesty takes many forms, from egregious examples such as copying an exam to borderline examples such as excessive collaboration or excessive paraphrasing. Very few students are habitual or serial cheaters. Most cheating is sporadic and only done in very specific situations.
Like other forms of cheating, academic cheating happens almost exclusively in situations that have a strong subset of the following characteristics.
Performance Orientation. When a final outcome depends on a single performance and not on the journey to it, cheating becomes more likely. When a single poor performance can invalidate all their past efforts, students are more likely to take extreme measures to ensure their measured performance at the critical moment is good.
High Stakes. If great rewards are at stake, the incentive to cheat predictably rises. Only the size of the potential reward seems to matter, not the severity of the potential punishment for cheating. Punishments are a poor deterrent because most cheaters are either unaware that their behavior counts as cheating or are confident that they will never be caught.
Extrinsic Motivation. Students who are intrinsically interested in mastering a subject do not cheat; they would only be cheating themselves if they did. On the other hand, when students see an assessment purely as an externally-imposed obstacle or as a means to an end, they are more likely to morally justify cheating.
Low Self-Efficacy. Students do not cheat if they believe they are capable of succeeding by legitimate means. If they believe an assessment is unfairly rigged against them, they are more likely to view cheating as morally justifiable.
Perceived Peer Behavior. University students tend to be young and tend to be very sensitive to peer behavior. If students perceive that cheating is widespread and that their peers see it as a necessary part of getting ahead, they will see it that way too.
University life is a perfect storm of the factors that promote cheating. Students often leave lectures with excessive self-confidence about their understanding. They procrastinate on assignments and under-prepare for tests, believing that little effort will be required. Once they finally get to work, their severe lack of preparedness quickly becomes apparent and they fall into despair (low self-efficacy). The students angrily accuse the assessment of being arbitrary, unfair, and unrelated to their goals (extrinsic motivation). The students realize that the exam or deadline is imminent and that the success of the semester depends on this critical moment (performance orientation, high stakes). Fearing the disapproval of their parents if they do poorly (extrinsic motivation) and seeing similar desperation among their peers (perceived peer behavior), the students decide to optimize their grade, even if it means departing a bit from what might be called “original work”.
Ways to Reduce Cheating
Assess early and often. Many courses do not have any assessments until the midterm exam; students go for weeks without getting any feedback on their level of understanding. If frequent low-stakes or no-stakes exercises and tests are scattered throughout the course, students get frequent practice and feedback. When feedback is timely and students see their shortcomings early, they will spend the semester’s slack time learning the material legitimately rather than spend the semester’s crunch time figuring out shortcuts. When students get an early sense of what a course’s high-stakes assessments will look like, they are less likely to view the high-stakes assessments as unfair and worthy of cheating.
Adopt more forgiving grading structures. Traditional marking schemes that cleanly add up to 100% are very unforgiving; students adopt a scarcity mindset and view assessments as a way of losing marks rather than as a way of gaining them. If there is slack in the marking scheme or if a poor initial mark can be overridden by a better mark later, students are assured that they will get another chance. A forgiving system gives students both the opportunity and the motivation to continue trying to master the course material through legitimate means.
Clarify what integrity means. Condescending lectures about ethics during orientation week do not reduce cheating; students already know that submitting someone else’s paper as their own is wrong. Most cheating takes place on the blurry boundary between “original” and “unoriginal” work. All universities have academic integrity policies; most of the time, their disciplinary procedures are crystal-clear while their definitions of dishonesty are extremely generic. The definition of “original work” varies across disciplines and cannot be handled in a one-size-fits-all university policy. It should be the responsibility of the university to consistently administer discipline, but it must be the responsibility of individual instructors to clearly define what “original work” means in their course.
Keep punishments proportionate. Many universities have been making punishments harsher in recent years, including for first-time offenders. Universities with harsh punishments have similar rates of anonymous self-reported cheating, yet also have lower rates of accusations and convictions. When a single cheating offense is a career-ruining event, professors and students both become much more wary of making false accusations. Since so many cheating cases arise from misunderstandings rather than malice, a fair system should come with a non-trivial but relatively forgiving punishment for a first offense, but much harsher punishments for offenses after the first.
Discourage private settlements. Many professors strike private deals with their cheating students, pressuring students to confess and accept a punishment in return for not reporting the offense to the academic integrity office. Professors commonly do this when the academic integrity office is a smothering bureaucracy or when they expect that the office’s punishment will not be appropriate. This behavior is counter-productive since it causes academic integrity matters to be handled in an inconsistent and unpredictable manner across campus. It can also cheating to be perceived as a personal offense against the professor rather than an offense to the principle of academic integrity. Academic integrity offices are necessary for enforcing policy consistently across campus, but unless they make strides in making themselves less unbearable to work with, they will continue to be bypassed.
Put the students in the conversation. Universities with official student-administered “honor codes” have lower-rates of cheating than schools without honor codes, even though the level of enforcement tends to be around the same. The difference from an academic integrity policy is that honor codes are maintained by student representatives rather than by faceless administrators. Students are sensitive to peer pressure, so when they see that student leaders are involved in the campus-wide conversation on integrity, they are more likely to view academic integrity as a community norm rather than an as a top-down imposition.