If you cheat, there’s a chance it is your teacher’s fault, so says a CanWest News Service article by Amy Minsky entitled Cheating stats getting out of control: Researcher. The American Psychological Association met in Toronto this past Saturday and sited the problem of cheating as a growing concern. One of the statistics sited at the convention is that 75% of college students cheat, according to Eric Anderman, an Ohio State professor of educational policy and leadership . Interestingly, Anderman blamed academic pressure on on students to achieve as the source of cheating. This falls in line with the findings on plagiarism we reported on from Susan D. Blum in My Word! Plagiarism and College Culture.
Two unanswered questions stand out. The first is, How is it that students are apparently unaware of the level of cheating that is going on around them? Jordan (2001) found that students greatly underestimated the percentage of their peers who cheat. Yet the literature shows that the majority of students are cheating. Could it be that because students are aware that cheating is unethical they do not conceive of it being a widespread problem? And if students believe they are in the minority when it comes to cheating, is there a level of guilt and or shame that they feel? Could this be used somehow to decrease the incidence of cheating?
The second unanswered question is, Why is there so much cheating in colleges? Jordan (2001) cites reasons such as extrinsic motivation and Stearns (2001) cites “mean” and “unfriendly” professors but cheating would not be necessary even in these cases if the students were familiar and comfortable with the academic material. Therefore, the question becomes are students cheating because the material is too advanced for them or are they simply too lazy to put in the required amount of time and effort to write their own papers or take their own exams? Or are there other factors involved such as the need to work to earn money to attend school or the modern day need for a college degree forcing students into college who might not otherwise have chosen to go?
Despite these unanswered questions, two very important and surprising facts are learned from the research. First, students who cheat in college are more commonplace than students who never cheat. And second, neither college administrators, teachers, nor the research experts know what to do to effectively stop the cheating. My own viewpoint on this issue is that professors in each class should remind students of the dire consequences of cheating when giving out each assignment and before handing out each exam. Students should be made to sign an honor pledge on their assignments and exams and understand that expulsion from school is the only consequence to cheating.
Given the amount of fraud one hears about everyday being committed by corporations and government officials though, it should not come as a surprise that there is so much cheating going on in colleges. After all, the cheating students of today are the corporate moguls and elected officials of tomorrow.
Jordan, Augustus E. “College Student Cheating: The Role of “Motivation, Perceived Norms, Attitudes, and Knowledge of Institutional Policy.” Ethics & Behavior. Jul2001, Vol. 11 Issue 3, p233.
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