August 19, 2008

Psychological Research About Students Who Cheat Could Help Anti-Cheating Campaigns

Professors who use detection programs like Turnitin in the hope of dissuading students from cheating may be on the wrong track. New research by psychologists at Ohio State University at Newark focuses instead on profiling the students who are least likely to cheat, and the findings could help identify a target audience for anti-cheating campaigns, one of the researchers said in a news release from the university.

The research is based on two studies that together involved more than 450 undergraduates at the Newark campus. The studies found, not too surprisingly, that students who said they had not cheated in the past month or year and had no plans to cheat in the future also scored highest on tests measuring qualities like courage, empathy, and honesty. Non-cheaters were also less likely to believe that their peers had cheated, the studies found. By contrast, students who scored lower on measurements of courage, empathy, and honesty were more likely to report having cheated, and to believe that other students cheated more often than they themselves did, thus rationalizing their behavior.

Honest students “have a more positive view of others,” explained Sarah Staats, a professor of psychology and a co-author of the study, who presented the findings this past weekend at the annual conference of the American Psychological Association, in Boston. The findings, she said, have implications for identifying both “academic heroes” (non-cheaters) and effective target audiences for anti-cheating campaigns.

When researchers asked students if they planned to cheat in the future, 47 percent said they did not, while 24 percent agreed or strongly agreed that they would. Anti-cheating campaigns, said Ms. Staats, may be able to sway the undecided 29 percent through messages rooted in positive psychology. “Our results suggest that interventions may have a real opportunity to influence at least a quarter of the student population,” she said. —Paula Wasley

Comments

1. How enlightening: honest students don’t cheat; dishonest ones do! I wonder who paid for this study.

   — linda    Aug 20, 06:43 AM    #

2. The results hinge on the supposition that dishonest people would answer a survey about cheating honestly. I wonder how many subjects copied their survey answers from the person next to them?

   — Dick Nixon    Aug 20, 06:44 AM    #

3. Reminds me of the Russians. Their system makes every student cheat. Results are obvious.

   — Lawman    Aug 20, 07:15 AM    #

4. I think the other two findings are more interesting… that in addition to honesty, non-cheaters score higher on measures of courage and empathy. We do a disservice to students, both in academia and in society, if the price of failure is so high they fear to express themselves honestly, to risk (negative) judgment, or to risk their futures on a poor grade. To some degree it doesn’t matter if these risks are real, only that students perceive them to be real. If students are lacking in empathy—some sympathy for the consequences of their actions on others—where have they learned this important lesson?

   — Leslie Killgore    Aug 20, 07:55 AM    #

5. This is interesting. When I researched students about cheating, most said they didn’t cheat. But, when you talked with them further, they did cheat – they just didn’t acknowledge that what they were doing was cheating. I think a more qualitative approach may provide more insight into this research ie – what is cheating?

   — Maureen Wideman    Aug 20, 08:43 AM    #

6. We also have to make our students believe that instances of cheating are quite low. Whether or not you think your peers cheat will be a huge predictor of whether you will. I think the causality goes in that direction (“everyone else is doing it! I have to do it, too, in order to maintain fairness!”) rather than rationalization after the fact. I think someone mildly inclined to cheat will be much less likely to do it if s/he discovers that no one else in the class is even considering cheating. Sometimes our scare tactics on cheating will remind students that other people are doing it, and might ironically encourage them to consider it.

   — Katherine    Aug 20, 09:06 AM    #

7. A few years ago my ex went to prison for a white collar crime. When friends would ask me if I was surprised, I thought back to his attitude about cheating when he was in college and realized maybe I wasn’t. I often share his story with my students when we talk about cheating – old habits are hard to break.

   — BH    Aug 20, 09:12 AM    #

8. Non-cheaters are “heroes”? Please.

   — SG    Aug 20, 09:38 AM    #

9. I find it somewhat interesting, that a comparative analysis on cheating, has not focused on the honor code schools.

   My daughter attended one, and based on anecdotal evidence I can emphatically state that dishonesty or cheating were virtually non-existent.

   The honor code at her school [Mt. Holyoke College] made self-scheduled, self-proctored, exams (including the finals) a reality. —- And, my niece (currently a student at Mt. Holyoke), choose the college primarily because of its honor code.

   Briefly expounding on the above, early in her first semester on campus, my daughter lost a fifty dollar bill, and she thought that was the end of it, a while later she mentioned it to some of her friends, who said just check with lost and found or ask around, if someone found it, you get it back —- guess what someone had found $50 in the laundry room —- and yes she got it back.

   Consider another aspect, whenever I visited her I couldn’t help noticing, the kids not only left their rooms unlocked, but also were unconcerned about leaving their pocket books or other valuables unattended. —- And, when she came hope for the summer, her stuff was stored on campus along with those of the other kids, and no-one took anyone else’s stuff.

   — zahid    Aug 20, 10:02 AM    #

10. Just FYI – Mt. Holyoke is a great school, but my niece did get her laptop stolen out of her room. Thus, regardless of a school’s culture, I recommend not leaving rooms unattended.

    — Kyle David    Aug 20, 10:11 AM    #

11. I want to echo the comments made by Harmon. All of our actions have consequences, we have to be willing to accept them. There must be real consequenes for inappropriate behavior. Students will rise to our level of expectation for them. If we expect them to cheat they will.

    — James    Aug 20, 11:19 AM    #

12. One thing this research calls to my mind is that we have stopped talking about or even honoring in the subjects we teach these qualities —honesty, empathy, and courage — that we then miraculously hope to find in our students anyway. I teach psychology, and nowhere in the textbooks I use or have reviewed does any author or researcher use those words or study those concepts. The closest we get is Kohlberg’s “moral development” scale, on which the peak is “self-determination of morality.” My son just took a course in modern American literature—again, these qualities were conspiciously absent in the protagonists (I will not say “heroes”) of any of the books he was required to read.
    I realize terms like this are out of fashion, and can be used inappropriately (as the use of “academic heroes” in this article was, I agree) and even judgmentally, but I also agree with a previous commentator that, if we do not talk about these qualities and honor them in our schools, media, and society, where and why do we suppose students will learn them?

    — Nancy Knapp    Aug 20, 11:26 AM    #

13. Just for fun, I “ran” my dissertation through Turn-it-in. The “program” claims that I “borrowed” the terms “A Nation at Risk” from a high school student in Minot, North Dakota.

    Honestly, I swear that I came up with “A Nation at Risk” solely on my own!

    — Michael Moody    Aug 20, 11:29 AM    #

14. Is it really as simple as honest students don’t cheat, dishonest students do? Strong sense of self, self-worth, and courage to risk failure, and faith in the goodness of others are all emotional qualities that not every student has. In fact, lacking in the strength to try and fail is what keeps a majority of students and people from even attempting success. Students often prefer to not attempt any difficult task, thus not risking evaluation on their work (and thereby in their opinion their own worth).

    Since more companies are putting emotional IQ as a factor in hiring to determine an applicant’s emotional maturity and mental strength, then why is it so hard to believe that a sense of optimism and willingness to try is so unimportant in student success and in how students respond to the moral question “to cheat or not to cheat”?

    http://www.canadaone.com/magazine/mr060198.html
    http://www.boston.com/jobs/news/articles/2006/09/10/emotional_intelligence_a_new_hiring_criteria/

    — Penny Shreve    Aug 20, 01:30 PM    #

15. To Kyle David #12;

    Point well-taken, add’l., given the 5-College connection, and it’s interrelationship growth, those not immersed in the Mt. Holyoke culture, also have a greater presence on-campus than they had in the past. My niece does tell my daugher, that it has changed somewhat since her days.

    — zahid    Aug 20, 01:52 PM    #

16. re: #14 “honesty, empathy, courage” … these—as well as the idea of virtue in general—are commonly discussed in moral philosophy. We have a long tradition about these topics, from the ancient Greeks to contemporary behavioral science. See, e.g.,:

    http://www.amazon.com/Selection-Nicomachean-Aristotle-Containing-Delineation/dp/0766154807/ref=sr_1_6?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1219255078&sr=1-6
    http://www.amazon.com/Experiments-Ethics-Flexner-Lecture-College/dp/0674026098/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1219254556&sr=1-1

    But positive values and moral virtues should be recognized and celebrated more thoroughly in the wider society.

    — Steve, Aug 20, 02:02 PM #

    — Steve    Aug 20, 02:17 PM    #

17. It took a study to show that honest people don’t cheat. Thanks. Sounds like the government study that found the reason for most accidents on tricycles was children falling off.

    — Thomas Sparks    Aug 20, 04:00 PM    #

18. Are honest professors less likely to think that cheating is a problem among their students, and therefore allowing an environment in which students are able to cheat more easily?

    — Cathy    Aug 21, 09:38 AM    #

19. Why not do a study on how much the professors cheat. Everything from their credentials, tardiness, missing office hours, plagiarizing papers and syllabi, phony calling in sick, all the way to their income tax returns.
    Cry all you want about students, but the people at the top are as crooked as those in jail – only more educated.

    — unabashed male    Aug 21, 12:34 PM    #

20. I’m a Mt. Holyoke alum (mid-seventies.) Our honor system for exams was wonderful. I suspect that the climate was partly due to the students who attended at the time, but largely due to the impact on all of an individual’s choice to cheat. Specifically, the year before I arrived, someone walked out of an exam center with a copy of the final for the multi-section gateway course for English. We loved our system—where else could you go to an unproctored room to take an exam during the period YOU had decided you were ready to do it? And where else could you determine when you got to leave? Anyway, we all knew that if anything remotely like the removal of the ENG 199 final EVER happened again, we’d lose this wonderful system.
    The climate thus created made it socially unacceptable to cheat. When my roommate and I (who shared a major) talked before either of us had taken the Organic final, we disagreed about whether a specific topic would show up. Once I took the exam, I KNEW it hadn’t—but I wouldn’t dream of telling and she wouldn’t dream of asking.
    BTW, I’m not sure how transferable this honesty was; I used to put skulls and crossbones on treats I’d left in the fridge to keep them from disappearing…

    — Vickie    Aug 24, 05:24 PM    #

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