ACADEMIC DISHONESTY Academic Dishonesty

Academic Dishonesty

Attention to academic dishonesty (aka cheating) by the popular press has burgeoned recently as seen in John Stockwell's movie Cheaters, Prime Time Live's (Velmans & Koppel, 2004) special on cheating and numerous newspaper articles depicting tales of teachers trying unsuccessfully to curb cheating in their classrooms or losing their own jobs for altering students' responses on standardized tests. This growing focus on cheating appears to parallel increases in academic dishonesty at all levels of education (Cizek, 1999). Moreover, students, teachers, and other school personnel have voiced concerns about cheating including the unfair advantage it provides to those who are dishonest and the ways in which it distorts the accuracy of available information about what students have actually learned. After defining academic cheating, this introduction presents an overview of the prevalence of cheating across age groups and discusses how students cheat.

Establishing a definition of academic dishonesty is complicated by numerous factors. Whereas some definitions focus solely on behavior, others specify information about the intent and consequences of the behavior. For example, one definition limits cheating to dishonest behavior that brings about an unfair advantage (Garavalia, Olson, Russell, & Christensen, 2007). Does that mean, for example, that Mark did not cheat if he receives a poorer exam grade than he might have achieved through his own efforts because he copied all the answers to the exam off Andre who, unbeknownst to Mark, had an alternate exam? If Tamara plagiarized on her history paper but did not intend to, has she cheated?

Cheating has been classified into four categories: the unapproved transfer of information between individuals, the use of unapproved materials, exploiting weaknesses in others, and plagiarism (Cizek, 2003). Although three of these four categories reflect behaviors, behavioral definitions are also problematic because of the lack of consensus as to some of the things that do and do not constitute cheating. For example, almost all university students and faculty agree that behaviors like copying off others on examinations, using crib sheets, and buying papers off the Internet to submit as one's own are definitely cheating, there is less of a consensus about other behaviors such as copying homework, handing in the same paper for multiple classes, or working on projects with peers outside of class when the teacher has not specifically indicated it was all right to do so (Whitley & Keith-Spiegel, 2002). Disparities between teacher and student views of the seriousness of various behaviors have been reported at the middle and high school level (Evans & Craig, 1990). Further, Kohn (2007) points out, even within the same school, some teachers may encourage collaborative homework completion, whereas others would call it dishonest.

Across the definitional debates, the clearest common components of what constitutes academic cheating include the use or provision of unauthorized means of information in a setting where there are assessment consequences for the performance (Garavalia et al., 2007). This is the definition used in this chapter. It provides some clear, common components of academic dishonesty, but it ...