This article is from the October 2010 Turnitin Newsletter.
Reducing the Prevalence of Cheating
What steps can educators take to reduce the prevalence of cheating?
Recent research published in Mid-Western Educational Researcher looked at high school students’ perceptions of cheating on tests, completing homework and writing reports. This study revealed that students tended to consider cheating activities as more significant with testing, less so with homework and least of all with writing reports. Students viewed cheating behaviors in the classroom more harshly than cheating behaviors outside the classroom. 54% of students surveyed did not identify plagiarism as a form of cheating and 50% admitted that they had used material either from the internet or someone else’s ideas as their own and/or plagiarized material in a written report.
“Students generally understand what constitutes cheating, but they do it anyway,” said Kenneth Kiewra, professor of educational psychology at University of Nebraska-Lincoln and one of the study’s authors. “They cheat on tests, homework assignments and when writing reports. In some cases, though, students simply don’t grasp that some dishonest acts are cheating.” The study recommends that educators use such information about cheating behavior to “seek ways to link students’ cheating perceptions with ethical guidelines to diminish cheating behaviors across academic tasks.”
Read the complete article, “Cheating Perceptions and Prevalence Across Academic Settings” on pages 10 to 17 of the Mid-Western Educational Researcher’s Spring 2010 issue [pdf].
Another recent article in Library Media Connection, “Stemming the Tide of Plagiarism: One Educator’s View” by Kathy Lehman, summarized students’ comments and perspectives on cheating and offers some possible solutions. Student comments included:
- “I think the main reason students cheat is that most students are lazy. They wait to the last second to do their work and the only way to get it done is to get it from another source.”
- “Cheating is seen as the easy way out in many aspects and students love to make things easier for themselves.”
- “Students are more inclined to cheat when they have other academically challenging classes such as honors classes or AP classes. Other obligations […] also create more pressure for students to cheat when they lack time to study and prepare themselves for an upcoming test or exam.”
- “Using the things around us to get something done is NOT ‘cheating.’”
- “Technology and other sources have provided so much information that it takes less effort to cheat than it does to actually do the assignment and learn from it.”
- “Cheating doesn’t have the consequences it should.”
- “To me cheating is like stealing, it should make you feel bad that you stole someone’s idea or paper that they worked hard on . . . I work really hard to write my papers and do my school assignments.”
- “Cheating is dumb and pointless. If a person cheats on a constant basis then they aren’t retaining any information … so they have to cheat again and again.”
Read the full article from Library Media Connection’s October 2010 issue [pdf] to see suggestions of ways to reduce cheating and support the students putting in the effort.
